A turbofan engine for providing propulsive thrust to a supersonic aircraft is provided. The engine has an engine core comprising in flow series a compressor, a combustor and a turbine. The engine further has a fan located upstream of the engine core. The engine further has a supersonic intake for slowing down incoming air to subsonic velocities at an inlet to the fan formed by the intake. The engine further has a bypass duct surrounding the engine core, wherein the fan generates a core airflow to the engine core and a bypass airflow through the bypass duct. The engine further has a mixer for mixing an exhaust gas flow exiting the engine core and the bypass airflow exiting the bypass duct. The engine further has a thrust nozzle rearwards of the mixer for discharging the mixed flows. The engine further has a controller configured to control the thrust produced by the engine over a range of flight operations including relatively high thrust transonic push operation during which the aircraft transitions from subsonic to supersonic flight and relatively low thrust supersonic cruise operation. To change the level of engine thrust between the transonic push operation and the supersonic cruise operation, the controller varies an area of a variable area throat of the thrust nozzle and/or adjusts one or more components which vary the relative areas available for the hot exhaust gas flow and the cold bypass airflow at the mixer while holding the fan inlet non-dimensional mass flowwT/Psubstantially constant, where w is the mass flow of the incoming air at the fan inlet, T is stagnation temperature of the incoming air at the fan inlet and P is stagnation pressure of the incoming air at the fan inlet.
Supersonic aircraft turbofan engine
2018-09-05
Patent
Electronic Resource
English