Influence of regeneration in the performance of a propfan engine

• Autor(a) principal: Ferreira, Carolina da Silva
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/3673
• topic: Indústria aeronáutica; Indústria aeronáutica - Aspectos ambientais; Indústria aeronáutica - Avaliação de desempenho; Motores propfan - Regenerador de calor; Motores propfan - Performance; Motores propfan - Consumo de combustível

The aviation industry is an essential element of today’s global society and thus cannot ignore the public concern about the global warming and the environmental issues as well as the global economy and fuel prices. The actual green thinking and the new policies to protect the environment promoted the creation of some aeronautical environmentally friendly projects. They are meant to create new and cleaner solutions looking for a way to reduce the environmental footprint of aviation industry. These considerations involve the development of new aircraft concepts with lower pollutant emissions and fuel consumption. Consequently, this study aims to analyze the viability of a propfan engine with the introduction of a heat regenerator. According to several authors, the propfan engines are more efficient than the current turbofans and the introduction of heat regenerators in the gas turbines engines reduces its specific fuel consumption. Therefore, the combination of both propfan engines and heat regenerators may be a viable solution to reduce the specific fuel consumption in the current engines even further. The main purpose of this research Thesis is to analyze if this new engine concept could be a “greener” substitute to the current turbofans. This work consists in the comparison of three different engine configurations: a current turbofan; a conventional propfan and a regenerated propfan engine. The analysis is performed to show the influence of engine parameters in specific fuel consumption and specific thrust. The use of the heat regenerator could be justified if the reduction of the SFC and the increase of specific thrust are worthwhile considering the extra weight of the heat exchanger.