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2021-08-01

GE Safran to Develop Sustainable Jet Engine

GE Aviation and Safran have jointly launched a technology development programme targeting more than 20 per cent lower fuel consumption and CO2 emissions compared to today’s engines.

The CFM RISE (Revolutionary Innovation for Sustainable Engines) programme will demonstrate a range of new, disruptive technologies for future engines that could enter service by the mid-2030s.

The companies have also signed an agreement extending the CFM International 50/50 partnership to the year 2050, declaring their intent to lead the way for more sustainable aviation in line with the industry’s commitment to halve CO2 emissions by 2050.

John Slattery, President and CEO of GE Aviation, explained: “The relationship between GE and Safran today is the strongest it has ever been. Together, through the RISE technology demonstration programme, we are reinventing the future of flight, bringing an advanced suite of revolutionary technologies to market that will take the next generation of single-aisle aircraft to a new level of fuel efficiency and reduced emissions.”

Olivier Andriès, CEO of Safran, added: “Our industry is in the midst of the most challenging times we have ever faced. We have to act now to accelerate our efforts to reduce our impact on the environment. Since the early 1970s, breakthrough engine efficiency and reliability have been the hallmark of our historic partnership and our LEAP engine already reduces emissions by 15 per cent compared to previous generation engines.”

The programme goals include reducing fuel consumption and CO2 emissions by more than 20 per cent compared to today’s most efficient engines, as well as ensuring 100 per cent compatibility with alternative energy sources such as Sustainable Aviation Fuels and hydrogen.

Central to the programme is propulsive efficiency for the engine, including developing an open fan architecture. This is a key enabler to achieving significantly improved fuel efficiency while delivering the same speed and cabin experience as current single-aisle aircraft.

Technology Roadmap

The programme’s joint engineering team has laid out a comprehensive technology roadmap including composite fan blades, heat resistant metal alloys, ceramic matrix composites (CMCs), hybrid electric capability and additive manufacturing.

The RISE programme includes more than 300 separate component, module and full engine builds. A demonstrator engine is scheduled to begin testing at GE and Safran facilities around the middle of this decade and flight test soon thereafter.

The Future of Flight

Travis Harper is the GE product manager on the CFM RISE programme.

Harper’s life has always been full of planes. Growing up two blocks away from Midway Airport in Chicago, there always seemed to be a jet landing over his family home. “Throughout my childhood, I was fascinated with aviation,” he says. “I would watch the planes take off and land and imagine having the opportunity to travel and experience the world.”

It was that same fascination that helped set the course of Harper’s life. He pursued engineering degrees from Northwestern University and Ohio State and earned a spot on a team at GE Aviation designing and manufacturing the world’s most advanced commercial jet engines.

The fascination with flight took him to Dubai, where he helped Emirates Airline maintain its fleet of airplanes using GE technology, and to Seattle, where he supported Boeing’s efforts to bring the plane-maker’s 777X aircraft, powered by the GE9X engine, into service.

Now it has brought him to the latest chapter in his career — a leadership role on a team reinventing the future of flight. He and his colleagues are developing the technology that could ultimately lead to an engine that would use 20 per cent less fuel and produce 20 per cent fewer CO2 emissions than the most efficient jet engines today.

CFM was founded nearly 50 years ago, and the partners agreed to extend the joint venture until the year 2050. The company has delivered more than 35,000 engines to more than 600 operators worldwide. This fleet has logged more than 1 billion engine flight hours.

Since the first CFM engines entered service in the early 1980s, the company has reduced its fuel consumption and CO2 emissions by 40 per cent compared with the engines it replaced. Harper and a team of some of the world’s best aerospace engineers intend to slash those numbers by another 20 per cent, which would represent the greatest decarbonisation gain it has ever achieved.

Their ambitious vision depends on big advancements in engine architecture and technology. But the team is up to it. “I spend a lot of time with Safran, airframers and airlines,” Harper says.

The fan at the front of this architecture is “open” because, unlike other turbofan engines, it isn’t surrounded by a case. This open fan can help provide significant improvement in propulsive efficiency, a key contributor to reduced emissions and fuel consumption. “Our most sustainable solutions — the ones that provide the greatest benefit — require an open-fan architecture, as a matter of physics,” Harper says.

That fan is the most eye-popping feature. The team plans to make it from a special carbon fibre woven in three dimensions and injected with resin. Light and tough, the material allows engineers to go big and build rotors as large as 13 feet in diameter, which, increases propulsive efficiency and bypass ratio. The bypass ratio is an extremely important number that describes the relationship between the thrust the rotor (fan) generates and how much energy it takes to drive the rotor.

CFM engines have grown from an initial bypass ratio of 5:1 in the 1980s to the LEAP engine, which has a bypass ratio of 11:1.

An open fan could achieve a bypass ratio above 70:1. Building a bigger fan isn’t the only way to make an engine more efficient. Another approach involves improving the core of the engine that holds the compressor, combustor, turbine and other components that convert the fuel’s energy into efficient rotary motion.

The RISE team is doing that by using another revolutionary material already tested in the LEAP engine and the GE9X. This material — called ceramic matrix composites, or CMCs — is one-third the weight of steel but can withstand temperatures as high as 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit, beyond the melting point of many advanced metallic superalloys. That increase in temperature improves an engine’s thermal efficiency.

“As a child watching planes take off and land on the south side, I would never have dreamt that I would be leading our efforts to develop technologies that will make flying even more sustainable and available for generations to come,” says Harper. Reinventing the future of flight gives him that opportunity.

Credit: GE Reports.

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