Propfan

A propfan, also called a propjet, an open rotor engine, or an open fan engine, is an aircraft engine combining features of turbofans and turboprops. It uses advanced, curved propeller blades without a duct. While propfans first started prototype testing in the 1970, aiming to combine the speed capability of turbofans with the fuel efficiency of turboprops, especially at high subsonic speeds, they have never proceeded beyond testing, never going into commercial use. Over the decades, different efforts to perfect the concept have used names like "open rotor" and "ultra-high-bypass (UHB) turbofan".

In the 1970s, Hamilton Standard described its propfan as "a small diameter, highly loaded multiple bladed variable pitch propulsor having swept blades with thin advanced airfoil sections, integrated with a nacelle contoured to retard the airflow through the blades thereby reducing compressibility losses and designed to operate with a turbine engine and using a single stage reduction gear resulting in high performance". In 1982, the weekly aviation magazine Flight International defined the propfan as a propeller with 8–10 highly swept blades that cruised at a speed of 390–480 knots (450–550 miles per hour; 720–890 kilometres per hour), although its definition evolved a few years later with the emergence of contra-rotating propfans.

In 1986, British engine maker Rolls-Royce used the term open rotor as a synonym for the original meaning of a propfan. This action was to delineate the propfan engine type from a number of ducted engine proposals at the time that had propfan in their names. By the 2000s, open rotor (OR) became a preferred term for propfan technology in research and news reports, with contra-rotating open rotor (CROR) also occasionally being used to distinguish between single-rotation propfans. As of 2015, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) defined an open rotor concretely (but broadly) as "a turbine engine fan stage that is not enclosed within a casing"; in contrast, it had only a working definition of an open rotor engine (the more commonly used term for propfan in the 21st century), calling it "a turbine engine featuring contra-rotating fan stages not enclosed within a casing." The engine uses a gas turbine to drive an unshrouded (open) contra-rotating propeller like a turboprop, but the design of the propeller itself is more tightly coupled to the turbine design, and the two are certified as a single unit.

In a 2017 Ahmed El-Sayed, a professor in the design and performance of aircraft engines, differentiated between turboprops (which have been in use since the 1940s) and propfans (which have yet to advance beyond a few prototypes) according to 11 different criteria, including number of blades, blade shape, tip speed, bypass ratio, Mach number, and cruise altitude.

About a decade after German aerospace engineers began exploring the idea of using swept wings to reduce drag on transonic speed aircraft, Hamilton Standard in the 1940s attempted to apply a similar concept to aircraft propellers. It created highly swept propeller blades with supersonic tip speeds, so that engines with exposed propellers could power aircraft to speeds and cruising altitudes only attained by new turbojet and turbofan engines. Early tests of these blades revealed then-unresolvable blade flutter and blade stress problems, and high noise levels were considered another obstacle. The popularity of turbojets and turbofans curtailed research in propellers, but by the 1960s, interest increased when studies showed that an exposed propeller driven by a gas turbine could power an airliner flying at a speed of Mach 0.7–0.8 and at an altitude of 35,000 feet (11,000 metres). The term propfan was created during this period.

One of the earliest engines that resembled the propfan concept was the 4,710 pounds-force (21.0 kilonewtons) Metrovick F.5, which featured twin contra-rotating fans—14 blades in the fore (front) fan and 12 blades in the aft (back) fan—at the rear of the engine and was first run in 1946. The blades, however, were mostly unswept. Other contra-rotating propeller engines that featured on common aircraft included the four powerful Kuznetsov NK-12 engines (each powering its own set of coaxial contra-rotating propellers) on the Soviet Union's Tupolev Tu-95 high-speed military bomber and Antonov An-22 military transport aircraft, and the Armstrong Siddeley Double Mamba (ASMD) engines (both connected to a lone set of coaxial contra-rotating propellers) on the British Fairey Gannet anti-submarine aircraft. Both setups had four largely unswept blades in the front propeller and the back propeller.

When the 1973 oil crisis caused petroleum price spikes in the early 1970s, interest in propfans soared, and NASA-funded research began to accelerate. The propfan concept was outlined by Carl Rohrbach and Bruce Metzger of the Hamilton Standard division of United Technologies in 1975 and was patented by Rohrbach and Robert Cornell of Hamilton Standard in 1979. Later work by General Electric on similar propulsors adopted the name unducted fan, which was a modified turbofan engine, with the fan placed outside the engine nacelle on the same axis as the compressor blades.

During this era, the propeller problems became fixable. Advances were made in structural materials, such as titanium metal and graphite and glass fiber composites infused with resin. These materials replaced aluminum and steel metals in blade construction, which allowed the blades to be made thinner and stronger. Computer-aided design was also useful in refining blade characteristics. Since the blades bend and deflect with higher power loading and centrifugal force, the initial designs needed to be based on the in-motion shape. With the help of computers, the blade designers would then work backward to find the optimal unloaded shape for manufacturing purposes.