Eight Decades of Progress - A Heritage of Aircraft Turbine Technology (1980)

overscan (PaulMM)

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I found a copy of A Eight Decades of Progress - Heritage of Aircraft Turbine Technology going cheap on Abebooks which cheap postage to NZ which was too good to resist.

Its a giant book in all respects; 3.8 pounds in weight, substantially larger than A4, with 328 thick, glossy pages. Lots of colour too.

Its basically a corporate history of General Electric's aircraft turbine engines up to the end of the 1970s. Its got some interesting obscure stuff in there as well as the more well known engines, like a photo and some discussion of the GE XF100 demonstrator engine which lost to P&W.

Ironically, the primary reason was the Air Force doubted they had the detailed knowledge of intake / fan compatibility gained during the F-111 / TF30 troubles. Ironic because the early F100 suffered badly with engine stalls the GE F101, F404 and F110 proved extremely tolerant of disturbed airflow.

It looks like an interesting "coffee table" style book but its also well-researched from the GE Corporate archives and full of little nuggets of information.
 
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Any information on the architecture of the XF100 (i.e. stage counts)?
 
Nothing about the architecture, but it was developed at the same time as the F101, so I would imagine the configuration would be similar, with a lower bypass ratio.
 
The F118 engine in the B-2A and the TR-2S uses a mix of F101, F110, and CFM56 hardware along with a fan that is very highly distortion tolerant. I suspect the architecture allows this "mix and match". BTW, I have heard that when, P&W was second source on the F404, differences in build specifications and tolerances led to P&W making a F404 that did suffer a stall.
 
Yes from GE1 onwards the key principle at GE was "building blocks". The F110 was a scaled-up F404 fan mated to the F101 core.

After losing the F100 competition due to concerns over inlet/airframe matching in Feb 1970, GE assigned 3 engineers to work closely with the 3 AMSA contenders to ensure this wasn't repeated. In June 1970, they won the F101 program.
 

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