Gas Turbines

Jet engines, since their appearance in World War II, have literally revolutionized almost all aspects of aviation. Because of improvements in jet engines, aircraft continually fly faster, further, and carry more payload. The reliability and longevity of jet engines has made air travel one of the safest and least expensive means of transportation.

Blades

Design Analysis of
Messerschmitt Me-262 Jet Fighter
by John Foster, Jr.

Part 1 - The Airframe (6.4MB PDF)

Part 2 - The Powerplant (4.8MB PDF)

Compilation Copyright, J.L. McClellan, 2004
The AEHS is indebted to Mr. J.L. McClellan and to the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company for their generosity in allowing the publication of these important insights into the Messerschmitt Me-262. These articles were originally published in the October and November, 1945 issues, Volume 44, numbers 10 and 11, of Aviation magazine, published by McGraw- Hill Publishing Company of New York, NY, USA. They were reconstructed from microfilm by J.L. McClellan. The source is University Microfilms International, Publication No. 364 (Aviation Week and Space Technology), Reel No. 21 (January 1945 – December 1945).

The reconstruction process used by Mr. McClellan is highly labor intensive, using much level stretching, followed by hand touch-up of lines and clean up of extraneous marks, gray areas and other image defects.

The microfilm was taken from a tightly bound volume, so that there is some distortion of the images, especially near the binding. It has not been practical to remove or compensate for all the distortions, so none of the illustrations in this reconstruction should be considered reliable sources as to fine details of shape, proportion or spatial relationship. The distortions are, in general, small, and should not detract from a general appreciation of arrangement and relationship. Mr. McClellan has attempted to represent the original layout of the article, but there are some exceptions. Limitations in the compositing tools cause a difference in the text flow relative to the illustrations, compared to the original, so that some changes have been made, to compensate partially for that effect, and the tabular data have been removed from the flow of text and brought together on a single page after the text, partly to make them more accessible, and partly to sidestep problems with page layout. In addition, the original Part II article contained a foldout. Images from that sheet have been added at the end of the article. The images have considerable overlap, so that no information is lost, even though it is not practical to reproduce the original illustrations.

Rolls-Royce Jet Engine Education Series (includes animation)

Last Run of the Pratt & Whitney J58

The Whittle/Rover W2B and
Rolls-Royce W2B/23 Welland Turbo-Jets
By Peter Berry

Lycoming Gas Turbines - Textron Lycoming via Ken Collinge