TR Propulsion Systems

[Rooxbar]

Btw, Tf35K consortium seems to have officially grown.

According to Mete Yarar quoting/confirming what he says by quoting the interview of journalists (Mr.Mustafa Kartoğlu) with President Mr Erdoğan on airliner. He said that RR has joined Tf35K team and actively participated in the design phase.

Turkiye Gazetesi has also announced in similar dates that RR and KALE (TAEC) has joined the Tf35K program. According to news, Serial production will be done by TEI but Alp aviation, Trmotor and Kale will also join the serial production. TAEC will only have responsibility for design and certification.

According to this news, Design and development team will be shaped as follow;

Design:

• Trmotor (Main contractor)
• IvP
• TEI
• RR
• Kale

Serial production

• TEI (Main contractor)
• Trmotor
• Kale
• Alp Aviation

I hope they realize the criticality of this and are not unnecessarily frugal with it. Just pour money into this thing. Need several environmental testing facilities, high altitude test facility, etc. and the test bed which costs a lot afaik. Anybody have any idea what's our situation with these things already?

 

[boredaf]

Currently, 650 engineers are working on design projects. This number will probably now approach 1000s. With joining of RR, it will probably be worked as a consortium similar to Eurojet but IP rights of each piece to be designed will belong to Turkiye. Under leadership of Trmotor, The engine will be divided into certain sections according to difficulty levels and there will be certain sections that each company is responsible for designing I guess. Different qualification and test procedures will be carried out for each section and final assembled parts will eventually Power our "Freedom" called Tf35K

This will be very, very interesting to see. I would expect (or hope) we're going to hear even more about if after TF-6000 is ignited and Kaan's first flight. RR's expertise could, at least in theory, give us quite a boost in this endeavour and I think this will be a good practice run for RR for their Tempest engine, and maybe give them some ideas as well.

 

[Cabatli_TR]

I hope they realize the criticality of this and are not unnecessarily frugal with it. Just pour money into this thing. Need several environmental testing facilities, high altitude test facility, etc. and the test bed which costs a lot afaik. Anybody have any idea what's our situation with these things already?

Pay attention to priority levels

 

[Zafer]

RR involvement should shorten the development timeline by many years. I bet they already have worked out what the engine should be like. It will depend in part on what production and material science capabilities TEI will be able to afford before the design is finalized. I think all the speculations about timelines will be reconsidered in this case. 2026 first ignition and 2028 first production dates are a piece of cake IMO.

 

[Nilgiri]

This is nice to hear. Eutectic is a terminology used in chemistry. It denotes a mixture of two or more elements (in set proportions) which would melt and solidify at a single temperature that is lower than the melting points of the individual constituents.
Alloys made from Eutectic Oxides of CMC can be directionally solidified so that a single Crystal is formed and in turn they can improve the thermal performance properties of turbines. You can read a bit more in the link down below.

If we are working on these that is good news. I hope TEI is also planning to study adaptive cycle systems along side of the development of TF35K engine.

https://aerospacelab.onera.fr/sites/w3.onera.fr.aerospacelab/files/AL3-07_0_0.pdf

Its a complicated emerging field since about the 1970s (DS oxide composites).

You could technically use non-eutectic oxides and make DS. One would save cost and QC needs in the early production stage but severely increase them in the later stage (along with performance loss, I am unsure of the exact scale of the performance loss, but it would be lot worse than Single crystal superalloy for sure ). Basically the tradeoff is really bad for non-eutectics here (this does change somewhat for the semiconductor field, but thats another story).

It has to do with keeping the material as simple as possible regd grain boundaries and alignments (the overall integrals governing them in 3D-space). A eutectic always ensures presence of 2 rather than 3 factors.....or 3 instead of 4 ( n minus 1)....and so on (but composites rarely go past ternary and for good reason again due to benefit of simplicity and how that mitigates cascading in something later).

The great advantages (among others regarding the materials themselves) are thus baked in to harness in the directional solidification final stage and fabrication quality control....which are very much related to the crystallography of page 6 found in the paper you posted....a non-eutectic (though offering a wider temperature range benefit and cost savings there) would greatly increase the orientations in play (because of n instead of n - 1 in the "baking") and all failure modes associated would cascade and weaken both what you can do with fab and final performance and QC.

Its not my field (my integrals involve the fluids rather than solids in these engines), but I remember reading a paper couple years ago and there were still lot of challenges they are in the process of figuring out, so this field will take a while to come to manufacturing stage, not sure how long though.

There were iirc basically tradeoffs within choice of binary (2) or ternary (3). Intuitively with the "keep it simple as possible". one would think 2 is best here, but there are advantages with 3 that boil down to pros and cons of Zirconia (and I think other interesting elements too) in these setups that they are still figuring out w.r.t the whole end-end production final cost/benefit (to say proven single crystal). We have to see how this rationalisation evolves.

In end everything kind of boils down to mother nature though...metals are very special in their electronic configuration w.r.t their nucleus sizes. This is what undergirths all the combination potentials in this broader metallurgy, ceramics and composite RnD field.

 

[Cabatli_TR]

Mr Akşit: "We are trying to persuade SSB support to establish a company with our industrialists for hydraulic forging operations of Titanium and Nickel super alloys with a capacity of 15,000+ tons press. SSB said they will support"

 

[Cabatli_TR]

Image from strategic Pure Nickel and pure Cobalt production

Laboratory scale studies and process optimization.
Establishing the process flow and verifying the process at pilot scale

 

[Rodeo]

Mr Akşit: "We are trying to persuade SSB support to establish a company with our industrialists for hydraulic forging operations of Titanium and Nickel super alloys with a capacity of 15,000+ tons press. SSB said they will support"

they should go for a heavier press. I have my doubts about producing bulkheads for KAAN through 3d printing. It may not scale well and we would be at mercy of the US for the equipment. We should be independent of the US in making of our planes and 15.000 ton press would not cut it.

F35, for instance, uses 50.000 ton press.

 

[Cabatli_TR]

Aviation stainless steel: AISI316 and 321
Super-Alloy: IN718, IN718+, UD720
SCB alloy: CMX4 and CMX10
Special alloy: Managing steel and M50

@Yasar
TEI has already produced CMSX10 in addition to CMSX4. Next one most likely will be the 4th generation MG-NG SCB...

 

[Cabatli_TR]

Titanium and Nickel forging tech

 

[Cabatli_TR]

Blade produced by additive manufacturing gives better results from forged one up to a certain temperatures

 

[Cabatli_TR]

Mr. Akşit and Denizli industrialist meeting presentation

 

[BalkanTurk90]

they should go for a heavier press. I have my doubts about producing bulkheads for KAAN through 3d printing. It may not scale well and we would be at mercy of the US for the equipment. We should be independent of the US in making our planes and 15.000 ton press would not cut it.

F35, for instance, uses 50.000 ton press.

With what press is Tai building Hurjet and Kaan for now? Did they start the aircraft with not ready production equipment ?

 

[Afif]

With what press is Tai building Hurjet and Kaan for now? Did they start the aircraft with not ready production equipment ?

TAI has bought world largest metal electron beam 3d printers from USA.

 

[uçuyorum]

TAI has bought world largest metal electron beam 3d printers from USA.

I had read that EBAM 3D printing of Inconel shows similar microscopic structure to forged ones

 

[Nilgiri]

they should go for a heavier press. I have my doubts about producing bulkheads for KAAN through 3d printing. It may not scale well and we would be at mercy of the US for the equipment. We should be independent of the US in making of our planes and 15.000 ton press would not cut it.

F35, for instance, uses 50.000 ton press.

The QC is in the end related to the pressure (in psi) the forge is able to develop. So for components in say propulsion, 15,000 ton would cover everything you need here.

Outsized monolith parts in the airframe like bulkhead yeah if you want to get the advantage of forging (over say 3d print or other options), you would need a larger forge there given much larger part (area) needing same pressure. There is trade off study here to do depending how many you plan to produce, as forging great advantage is its production rate.

But for propulsion context, this forge size mentioned is fine, the part sizes are small enough.

TAI has bought world largest metal electron beam 3d printers from USA.

The production rate is lot lower for these. Great for optimized parts which number just 1 to n within say an engine. But over a certain n number (and sometimes part size), forging is way more economical....holding complexity and QC the same.

A production line needs access to every capacity available so nothing holds up another, you just allocate to each which parts are best suited.

I had read that EBAM 3D printing of Inconel shows similar microscopic structure to forged ones

It is a field of great promise and potentials being unlocked. The main drawback with it is production rate (for what you invest) and will remain so for a long while.

 

[what]

Mr. Akşit and Denizli industrialist meeting presentation

So they have produced and put into service engines that are not publicly announced due to, I assume, political reasons?
Nice, but curious what that might be.

 

[BalkanTurk90]

So they have produced and put into service engines that are not publicly announced due to, I assume, political reasons?
Nice, but curious what that might be.

Can u tell more ? What kind of engines and where did they put?

 

[Kartal1]

So they have produced and put into service engines that are not publicly announced due to, I assume, political reasons?
Nice, but curious what that might be.

Can u tell more ? What kind of engines and where did they put?

The one that comes to my mind is the national replacement for the Herons in inventory. I don't remember to be officially announced but it is a public secret.

 

[Yasar_TR]

Aviation stainless steel: AISI316 and 321
Super-Alloy: IN718, IN718+, UD720
SCB alloy: CMX4 and CMX10
Special alloy: Managing steel and M50

@Yasar
TEI has already produced CMSX10 in addition to CMSX4. Next one most likely will be the 4th generation MG-NG SCB...

View attachment 63530

It is great that we are working on 4th generation single crystals now.
As can be seen from below file, CMSX4 series are 2nd generation and CMSX10 series are the third generation single crystal super alloys.

1st, 2nd and 3rd Generation Single-Crystal Nickel Based Superalloys

The patterns in which atoms are arranged in the solid state determine properties. These arrangements can be manipulated by altering parameters such as the chemical composition, temperature and magnetic field. A phase transformation is a change in the pattern of atoms. We work on phase...

www.phase-trans.msm.cam.ac.uk

MC-NG super alloy is the 4th generation version of the single crystals developed by the French company Onera.

https://www.tms.org/Superalloys/10.7449/2000/Superalloys_2000_829_837.pdf

TMS-138A is also a fourth generation single crystal super alloy that contains Ru (rubidium) and high concentration of Mo (Molybdenum) elements.

https://nippon.zaidan.info/seikabutsu/2003/00916/pdf/igtc2003tokyo_ts119.pdf

The Japanese IHI Corporation’s engine FX9, contains 5th generation single crystal super alloy turbine blades. Japanese have been quite active in the development of newer generation of single crystals.

TMS162, TMS173 and TMS196 alloys are all 5th generation single crystal super alloys.

https://www.tms.org/superalloys/10.7449/2008/Superalloys_2008_131_138.pdf

TMS238 is a 6th generation single crystal alloy

http://sakimori.nims.go.jp/catalog/6thGenerationSCTMS-238.pdf

Each new generation brings a 30 to 40 degrees centigrade improvement to the heat resistance properties of the blades. Also comes with each new generation, a better result for stress, creep resistance and micro-structural stability; plus a higher cost.