GREEN REASONS TO WORK TOGETHER ON THE OPEN-ROTOR ENGINE
Recent trendlines show greater cooperation between the United States and the European Union. On December 10, 2024, the FAA and EASA, for example, signed an agreement “to foster and enrich its partnership to support safe and secure civil aviation activities.”
Below are two, almost simultaneous, articles reporting separate research projects to develop an “open fan” concept airplane engine. Both efforts seek to reach a JOINT[1] “GLOBAL ENERGY-RELATED CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSIONS TO NET ZERO BY 2050”. Europe, America and most of the globe’s countries have committed to this target, in large part because, if each individual nation set its own standard, the higher level emissions of #1 State likely would move via the air to #2,3,4,n States.
Airbus and Boeing have been working, INDEPENDENTLY, to produce product to move on that green path. It has been suggested that A COORDINATED, IF NOT JOINT, EFFORT MIGHT ENHANCE the attainment of 2050.
The December 4, 2024, announcement of a cooperation among GE Aerospace, Boeing and NASA hopes that the US’S SUPERCOMPUTER MIGHT ESCALATE POSITIVE RESULTS. It is reputed that this monster of technology can reach a
“staggering processing speed of over a quintillion calculations per second…The supercomputer, equipped with approximately 37,000 GPUs, can accomplish in one second what would take the entire global population over four years to achieve.”
Coordinating these computations with the EU might benefit both continents and also all nations.
The December 10,2024, release by the EU, its organ CLEAN Aviation and a SAFRAN/AIRBUS team labeled OFELIA, announces its approach to developing an “open-rotor engine” through a series of ground and flight tests. Airbus has committed an A380 for hanging the experimental engines on this aircraft.
Usually reluctant to share valuable commercial data with a competitor, this collaboration should uniquely benefit the research partners. The likely manufacturers of the resulting GREEN advance will reside in the partners territories, and with that technology, will still compete on establishing the fabrication of the open duct powerplant.
GE Aerospace pairs with Boeing, NASA on new engine design
Partnership will use 840,000 hours of government supercomputer access to leapfrog current designs
By Larry Rulison,
Staff Writer
Dec 4, 2024
NISKAYUNA — Scientists and engineers working for GE Aerospace’s research lab in Niskayuna are joining with Boeing and NASA to develop a MASSIVE LEAP in airplane engine design and efficiency
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And they are getting a huge lift from two of the U.S. government’s most powerful supercomputers to get the task done.
GE Aerospace announced late last month that the U.S. Department of Energy allotted 840,000 hours of government supercomputer access to a research partnership between GE Aerospace, NASA, Boeing and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The supercomputer will help with simulations to test a new “open fan” concept airplane engine as if it were mounted on an actual airplane in flight.
.So-called open fan aircraft engines do not have the outer casing around the fan blades. The design allows for a larger fan size without as much drag as it would have with the casing, making the engines more fuel-efficient.
GE Aerospace said it would be impossible to replicate the engine being attached to a plane and used in flight in various conditions at this point in the design phase without enormous computing power.
“Advanced supercomputing capability is a key breakthrough enabling the revolutionary open nan engine design,” Arjan Hegeman, general manager for future of flight technology at GE Aerospace, said in a statement. “Airplane integration is critical.”
Two different government supercomputers will be used, the Aurora supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory and the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
GE Aerospace said that the use of the computers “allows the engine design to be optimized for additional efficiency, noise, and other performance benefits.”
GE Aerospace, which is headquartered in Cincinnati, has been hiring hundreds of new engineers, including in Niskayuna, where the company does research. GE Aerospace is the remaining business of General Electric Co. after GE spun off its energy division as GE Vernova, as well as its health care business. All three companies, which are all independent now, utilize the GE research center in Niskayuna for their funded research operations.
GE Aerospace makes aircraft engines in partnership with the French company Safran Aircraft Engines. The joint venture is working on other design improvements to their engines to increase fuel efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The program is intended to leapfrog the current designs.
Open-rotor concept in line for Clean Aviation flight-test funding
10 December 2024
Safran and CFM International look set to benefit from the first round of CLEAN AVIATION’S SECOND PHASE, which proposes to fund the flight demonstration of an open-rotor engine.
Due to be issued in February 2025, the next call for proposals will see a total of €380 million ($400 million) allocated BY THE EU body, a figure that will be more than matched by industry.
Airbus has previously agreed to flight test the RISE concept aboard an A380
Topics in the third call – phase one comprised two earlier calls – include the “flight-test demonstration of an unducted engine architecture”.
A Safran Aircraft Engines-led consortium has received €100 MILLION IN CLEAN AVIATION’S FIRST PHASE, funding a project called OFELIA – or open fan for environmental low impact of aviation.
Running until 31 December next year, OFELIA “aims to demonstrate at [technology readiness level] TRL5” the open-fan architecture being developed through the CFM RISE demonstrator programme.
This will see a “a large-scale open fan engine ground-test campaign” performed, which will “deliver flight-worthy propulsive system definition and prepare an in-flight demonstration” for Clean Aviation’s second phase.
Other members of the OFELIA consortium include multiple European subsidiaries of GE Aerospace – Safran’s partner in the CFM joint venture – and Airbus, which previously agreed to flight-test the RISE engine aboard an A380 testbed.
[deleted section on separate phase — short-medium-range aircraft]
[1] Net Zero by 2050 IEA; Net-Zero Emissions Operations by 2050, including a 65% reduction by 2030; White House; 2050 long-term strategy EU
