Chapter 528 Jet Engine

While Arthur was sighing at the rising housing prices in the United States, the Royal Aircraft Factory also reported a good news, that is, there was a huge improvement in aircraft technology.

Although Australasia's aircraft are currently ahead of other countries, there has been almost no major improvement in aircraft after World War I, and the gap with other countries has been narrowed.

Arthur has never reduced his investment in aircraft research and development. The research and development of aircraft technology has always been one of the important links in Australasia's military technology research and development, second only to rockets and missiles, and nuclear weapons, which Arthur currently has high hopes for.

In fact, this technology was not studied by the airport alone, but under the joint efforts of Diesel and the airport, the aircraft engine was further improved, and the famous jet engine of later generations was designed.

Yes, jet engine.

This advanced technology was actually explored by someone hundreds of years ago, but it has not achieved much results until now.

It is worth mentioning that in 1915, Albert Fano, a technical expert of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, designed a device to increase the range of artillery shells through gas and compressed air. This device compresses and ignites the airflow of artillery shells flying at high speed through a variable cross-section air intake to provide thrust.

The Austro-Hungarian army did not adopt Albert's design, which gave Arthur an opportunity.

After the end of World War I, Arthur formally invited Albert Fano to join the Royal Australasian Academy of Sciences, and his main research direction was power generation.

After that, Albert, as Diesel's assistant, concentrated on studying engines dedicated to aircraft, and the research lasted for several years.

Finally, after several years of hard work, the engine for the new generation of aircraft finally achieved results.

Of course, the newly studied engine is somewhat special. Albert and Diesel have their own ideas. The two cooperated with each other and developed two jet engines with different principles.

Although this seems incredible, if you know the achievements of the two in history, it is actually natural.

Albert studied the supersonic ramjet engine, which is also a jet engine and has the advantages of simple structure, light weight, small size, high thrust-to-weight ratio and low cost.

However, this type of ramjet engine has no compressor. During the test, it can hardly be started when it is stationary on the ground, so it is not suitable as a power unit for ordinary aircraft.

In order to solve this defect, Albert and Diesel jointly developed a second jet engine.

The second jet engine is similar to an axial-flow jet engine. Compared with the first jet engine, it is more suitable for the power system of ordinary aircraft, that is, military aircraft.

Of course, this does not mean that the ramjet engine designed by Albert alone is useless.

Although the ramjet engine is not suitable as a power unit for ordinary aircraft, it is very suitable for disposable aircraft such as missiles, and it is of vital help to the research of missiles and rockets.

This also means that the two newly studied jet engines play a vital role in the military research of Australasia, which Arthur did not expect, but it is definitely a good thing.

Without thinking too much, Arthur immediately arranged his schedule and came to the place where the two engines were tested, which is the Royal Aircraft Factory.

The birth of the jet engine also means that the birth of jet aircraft is not far away, which is why Arthur really cares about this technology.

Compared with the biplane propeller aircraft currently used by other countries, the single-wing propeller aircraft in Australasia is already very advanced, but the propeller speed has an upper limit, which also limits the speed of the current Australasia aircraft to a considerable extent.

If the research task of the aircraft can be placed on the jet aircraft, the flight speed of the aircraft will increase at a very exaggerated rate, which is a huge advantage for the aircraft of other countries.

Because it has been proved that the ramjet engine is not suitable for use in military aircraft, this technology has been handed over to the rocket research project to help rockets and missiles for better research.

Another jet engine technology is currently cooperating with the Royal Aircraft Factory to explore the first jet aircraft in Australasia.

In fact, the theory of jet aircraft was born as early as ten years ago. The first to propose the jet theory were Captain Marconi of France and Henry Coanda of Romania.

Henry Coanda had studied the earliest jet aircraft ten years ago, but the jet engine technology at that time was not perfect, and the Romanian government did not invest much in this area, so the jet aircraft test at that time failed, and the relevant research data was directly discarded as waste paper.

Although Henry Coanda's experiment failed, as a pioneer of jet aircraft, he naturally received an invitation from the Australasian Academy of Sciences. He has now joined the Australasian jet aircraft research team and is working for Australasia.

This is also one of the current characteristics of Australasia, which is very keen to attract well-known foreign scientists.

Basically, as long as scientists with a certain reputation in Europe and the United States have been invited by the Royal Academy of Sciences, many scientific research teams in Europe and the United States are very dissatisfied with Australasia. After all, Australasia's poaching behavior has caused them to suffer considerable losses.

Although Henry Coanda's jet aircraft experiment ultimately failed, his design concept for jet aircraft still has certain merits.

At least with Henry Coanda's failure experience, Australasia was able to avoid some detours when developing jet aircraft and had some experience that other countries could not have.

In fact, jet aircraft is still too advanced a concept in this era.

In the original history, even if jet engines had related ideas and even applied for patents, many aircraft manufacturers were still not interested in it.

They stubbornly believed that the realization of jet engines was as incredible as sending people to the moon, which was completely unrealistic.

At present, Australasia has been leading the world in the research of jet engines and jet aircraft for at least ten years. This is a precious opportunity for Australasia, an opportunity to far surpass other countries in the jet aircraft stage.

When he arrived at the aircraft manufacturing plant, the experts had already moved out the prototypes of the two jet engines for Arthur to watch in person.

Because of their different principles, the two jet engines still have great differences in structure.

Looking at the two modern engines, Arthur nodded with satisfaction, and turned his eyes to Albert and Diesel who developed the two jet engines, and asked with a smile: "How much thrust can these two engines generate at present?"

"Your Majesty, the jet engines we developed can use a variety of fuels as energy sources. Different fuels can produce different thrusts." Diesel explained.

"If we use our special diesel, both jet engines can provide 4 to 5kN thrust, and the current first-generation engine speed can reach the fastest speed of existing fighters."

In terms of speed, the improvement of jet engines compared to propeller engines is huge.

The He178, the first jet engine in history to successfully fly, successfully achieved a maximum speed of 700 kilometers per hour, which has a huge advantage over ordinary propeller aircraft.

Arthur nodded again, and was satisfied with the power of the current jet engine.

However, although the jet engine is already available, it will take a long time to equip it on fighters.

Although the development of jet aircraft was not started from scratch, there was no example to follow.

In addition, due to the need to keep it secret from other countries, basically all the original parts had to be produced by themselves, which also increased the difficulty of building jet aircraft.

There was also the power guarantee of the new jet engine. Compared with ordinary propeller aircraft, the gliding ability of jet aircraft was greatly reduced.

This also meant that if the engine lost power or was damaged, it would be a huge disaster for jet aircraft.

How to ensure the performance and stability of the jet engine was the problem that Diesel and Albert needed to study next.

But anyway, Arthur was quite satisfied that the jet engine could be developed at this point in time.

This was equivalent to an article that had already started, the most difficult part had been completed, and the rest was not a big deal.

No matter how difficult the design of a jet aircraft was, it would not be as difficult as the research of a jet engine.

On the premise that they already had a jet engine, I believe that the aircraft manufacturer would not let Arthur down, and it would not be long before Australasia had its own jet aircraft.

After encouraging many experts, Arthur also asked the airport to design a jet plane as soon as possible and put it into experiment.

After receiving general responses from many experts, Arthur left the airport with satisfaction, ending this trip to inspect jet engines.

Of course, before leaving the airport, Arthur did not do nothing.

The research of jet engines is a big deal for Australasia, so experts who study jet engines also need to be rewarded.

All experts received a check of 500 Australian dollars each, and the main force Albert and Diesel received 1,000 Australian dollars each, plus the statistics of the experts' contributions. This is the reward and reward from Arthur and other scientific research experts.

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