HIGHLY EFFICIENT TURBOFAN ENGINE AERO DESIGN FOR LONGER RANGE MUNITIONS

Small expendable gas turbine engines historically suffer from poor specific fuel consumption (SFC) and high costs for military applications. These engines are single-shaft turbojets and their use in the propulsion system of future advanced munitions such as the Army's Non-Line of Sight Launch System Loitering Attack Munition (NLOS-LS LAM) will greatly limit the munition's operational capability. Florida Turbine Technologies, Inc. (FTT) has developed an improved design concept for an expendable gas turbine engine for use in military applications. The new concept addresses key challenges that limit the effective use of small turbojets, and provides an alternative highly efficient affordable turbofan engine. FTT focuses the current effort on the development of an optimized aerodynamic design of fan, compressor and turbine airfoils using 3D steady and unsteady advanced computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The resulting aero design can be used in subsequent mechanical design of a small engine with half the fuel consumption and significantly lower cost than today's turbojet baseline. Analytical validation of the improvement in fuel consumption over today's turbojet baseline will be provided.