ENGINES.qxp_Finance 19/04/2022 14:48 Page 1
ENGINES
How BizAv’s Top Engine OEMs are Cutting Emissions With a growing emphasis on sustainability in BizAv, engine OEMs are focusing on reducing CO2 emissions, polluting oxides of nitrogen, and environmental noise from their Business Aviation engines. Chris Kjelgaard explores how…
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ith large sectors of the aviation industry having set themselves a 2030 goal for achieving net carbon neutrality, and the entire industry adopting a 2050 target for achieving zero carbon emissions, all major manufacturers of turbine engines are working intensively to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases from their powerplants. They’re working just as hard to reduce the levels of environmental noise their engines produce. The design and performance criteria for BizAv engines differ from those for commercial aircraft powerplants, however. Business Aviation operators mainly want their aircraft to fly faster and higher than airliners, but retain high dispatch reliability. For airliners, fuel-efficiency and engine reliability at very high daily utilization rates are vital. Nevertheless, the environmental imperatives facing the huge scheduled airline sector apply equally to the Business Aviation industry. Both high-profile aviation sectors are under tremendous public pressure to become more environmentally friendly and make their businesses more climate-sustainable. So, the impetus for manufacturers of Business Aviation turbine engines to reduce the levels of environmentally harmful emissions from their engines is just as great as for OEMs of commercial aero engines. In most cases, the companies which make the highestselling BizAv engines are the same ones which make the 90 Vol 26 Issue 5 2022 AVBUYER MAGAZINE
highest-selling commercial engines, so much of their R&D work on reducing emissions can be applied to their BizAv and commercial engine lines alike. Very simply, the more resourceful a turbine aero engine is in terms of its propulsive and thermal efficiency, the lower the levels of CO2 and other greenhouse-gas emissions it creates, compared with less-efficient engines of equivalent power. That’s because those engines will burn more fuel to achieve the same power output. For engineers designing modern turbofan and turboprop engines in Business Aviation, this (in practice) means the hotter the core section of the engine in which the air is compressed, mixed with fuel, combusted, and exhausted can run, and the smaller the core is in relation to the amount of secondary bypass air the fan or propellers create, the more efficient the engine will be. Looked at another way, the higher the engine’s operating ratio (the amount of bypass air accelerated by the fan or propellers to produce most, or all the engine’s thrust or power, divided by the amount of air passing through the engine core), the greater the engine’s efficiency becomes. This has enormous implications for the aerodynamic designs of the engine’s parts and the materials from which the parts are made. “Materials that withstand increased operating temperatures and higher stresses, at lower overall weight, are key differentiators,” says Edward Hoskin, Vice President, Engineering for Pratt & Whitney Canada. www.AVBUYER.com
