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Offering aircraft fuel efficiency improvements of 30 to 40% over the powerplants it will replace, PW2037 retrofit in the 727-200 Advanced and B-52 aircraft is attracting heightened interest. A comparison of PW2037 technical characteristics with current aircraft powerplants substantiates the improvement potential.The engine installation and modifications necessary for aircraft system compatibility do not impose significant increases in complexity or cost. The resultant improvements in aircraft capability (727 and B-52) and economic viability to airlines (7271 produce aircraft uniquely suited to today's operational requirements and constrained equipment budgets.

The 912 engine is a well known 4-cylinder horizontally opposed 4-stroke liquid-/air-cooled aircraft engine. The 912 family has a strong track record: 40 000 engines sold / 25 000 still in operation / 5 million flight hours annually. 88% of all light aircraft OEMs use Rotax engines. The 912iS is an evolution of the Rotax 912ULS carbureted engine. The “i” stands for electronic fuel injection which has been developed according to flight standards, providing a better fuel efficiency over the current 912ULS of more than 20% and in a range of 38% to 70% compared to other competitive engines in the light sport, ultra-light aircraft and the general aviation industry. BRP engineers have incorporated several technology enhancements. The fully redundant digital Engine Control Unit (ECU) offers a computer based electronic diagnostic system which makes it easier to diagnose and service the engine.

A centrifugal pump concept was elaborated for a multiple application in future spacecrafts. Based on this concept a prototype of a small centrifugal pump was manufactured and comprehensively tested. The model pump has been approved in different test series with the fluids liquid ammonia and demineralized water. The design of the model pump was driven by the strict requirements of COLUMBUS, namely long life, noiseless operation, minimum mass and low energy consumption. Because of its modular design and as a result of selected materials of multiple compatibility, this pump is suited for the delivery of various further fluids, such as freons, hydrocarbons, propellants (hydrazine) etc.. It is also capable of pumping corrosive or toxic fluids for laboratory processes in space. The wide speed range from about 1,000 to 20,000 rpm which corresponds to a flow from about 1 to 20 l/min, permits an energy saving adaption and flow control.

This paper describes a computational technique for prediction of the flow and thermal environment in the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Motor field joint cavities. The SRM field joint hardware has been tested with a defect in the insulation. Due to this defect, the O-ring gland cavities are pressurized during the early part of the ignition. A computer model has been developed to predict the flow and thermal environment through the simulated flaw, during the pressurization of the field joint. The transient mass, momentum, and energy conservation equations in the flow passage in conjunction with the thermodynamic equation of state are solved by a fully implicit iterative numerical procedure. Since this is a conjugate flow and heat transfer problem, wall temperatures are calculated by solving the one-dimensional transient heat conduction equation in the solid along with the other governing equations. The pressure and temperature predictions have been compared with the test data.

The Shuttle orbiter currently uses hydrazine-powered APU’s for powering its hydraulic system pumps. To enhance vehicle safety and reliability, NASA is pursuing an APU upgrade where the hydrazine-powered turbine is replaced by an electric motor pump and battery power supply. This EAPU (Electric APU) upgrade presents several thermal control challenges, most notably the new requirement for moderate temperature control of high-power electronics at 132 °F (55.6 °C). This paper describes how the existing Water Spray Boiler (WSB), which currently cools the hydraulic fluid and APU lubrication oil, is being modified to provide EAPU thermal management.

An important current engineering problem in the aviation field involves the providing of increasingly effective lubricating oil filtration for today's more advanced aircraft engines. The critical demands of the higher powered reciprocating engines and the new gas turbine engines, together with the strong desire to reduce aircraft operating and maintenance costs require considerable refinement and improvement in oil filtration methods. This paper discusses some recent developments in scavenge oil filtration and describes a basic, new filter design.

As the cost and complexity of modern aircraft systems increases, emphasis has been placed on model-based design as a means for reducing development cost and optimizing performance. To facilitate this, an appropriate modeling environment is required that allows developers to rapidly explore a wider design space than can cost effectively be considered through hardware construction and testing. This wide design space can then yield solutions that are far more energy efficient than previous generation designs. In addition, non-intuitive cross-coupled subsystem behavior can also be explored to ensure integrated system stability prior to hardware fabrication and testing. In recent years, optimization of control strategies between coupled subsystems has necessitated the understanding of the integrated system dynamics.

Hydrogen has difficulties in handling in a fuel cell vehicle, and has a fault with taking a big space there. The authors have proposed a hydrogen generation system using ammonia as a liquid fuel for fuel-cell electric vehicles. Ammonia has an advantage not to emit greenhouse effect gases because it does not contain a carbon atom. Hydrogen content of ammonia is 17.6 wt% and hydrogen quantity per unit mass is large. Ammonia can be easily dissociated to hydrogen and nitrogen by heating. Therefore, ammonia is an attractive hydrogen supply source for fuel cell vehicles. The ammonia hydrogen generation system of this study consists of a vaporizer, a heat exchanger and a cracking reactor with a separator. Ammonia is heated with the heat exchanger and sent to the cracking reactor, after it is evaporated through the vaporizer from the liquid ammonia. The ammonia is cracked to hydrogen and nitrogen with an appropriate catalyst.

Environmental sustainability is morphing Automotive technical development strategies and driving the evolution of vehicles with a speed and a strength hardly foreseeable a decade ago. The entire vehicle architecture is impacted, and energy efficiency becomes one of the most important parameters to reach goals, which are now not only market demands, but also based on regulatory standards with penalty consequences. Therefore, rolling drag from all bearings in multiple rotating parts of the vehicle needs to be reduced; wheel bearings are among the biggest in size regardless of the powertrain architecture (ICE, Hybrid, BEV) and have a significant impact. The design of wheel bearings is a complex balance between features influencing durability, robustness, vehicle dynamics, and, of course, energy efficiency.

In this study, the authors concluded that a super energy-efficient vehicle (SEEV) with fuel economy more than 100km/liter could be possible with the present technology level. The new environmentally-compatible vehicle was designed to mitigate urban warming, air pollution and CO2 emissions in the urban area. The authors evaluated optimal specifications of the new concept energy-efficient electric vehicle (EV) equipped with flywheel and photovoltaic (PV) cell and also reported the results of the running simulations for the proposed vehicle. The proposed SEEV will be very promising to mitigate urban and global warming, and toconserve fossil fuel consumption.

Proposed high altitude long endurance (HALE) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) concepts for solar powered aircraft indicate that energy storage devices will be required that significantly improve power, energy density, efficiency, and depth-of-discharge over state-of-the-art electrochemical (NiH2) batteries, without which these aircraft systems cannot become a reality. Flywheel energy storage systems offer the potential for making these systems concepts practical. However, current concepts for flywheel energy storage systems rely on energy conversion and power generation approaches that limit the available energy for aircraft use to near 60% of the fully charged capacity of the fly wheel, with efficiencies below 90%. With useable specific energy capacities below 50 Whr/kg, these systems are in capable of enabling solar-powered HALE UAV technology.

This paper is a review of the literature covering the history of the use of lubricants. The uses of oils derived from animals, vegetables and minerals are placed in perspective from ancient times to the Wright Brothers' flight in 1903. After that period, the discussion is confined largely to the lubrication of aircraft piston engines. The paper attempts to explain the preference for castor oil in European and British engines and the more general, but by no means exclusive, use of petroleum-based mineral oils in the United States. The British Air Ministry, in 1929, reached a decision to abandon castor oil due to availability and cost of petroleum-based oils. The simultaneous U.S. Army Air Corps recognition of the advantages of the very flat viscosity-temperature curve of Pennsylvania oils for hot running engines and for cold starting led to the world-wide use of these lubricating oils.

Minimizing energy use on more electric aircraft (MEA) requires examining in detail the important decision of whether and when to use engine bleed air, ram air, electric, hydraulic, or other sources of power. Further, due to the large variance in mission segments, it is unlikely that a single energy source is the most efficient over an entire mission. Thus, hybrid combinations of sources must be considered. An important system in an advanced MEA is the adaptive power and thermal management system (APTMS), which is designed to provide main engine start, auxiliary and emergency power, and vehicle thermal management including environmental cooling. Additionally, peak and regenerative power management capabilities can be achieved with appropriate control. The APTMS is intended to be adaptive, adjusting its operation in order to serve its function in the most efficient and least costly way to the aircraft as a whole.

Specifications describing performance characteristics for lubricating oils are examined. The author describes the engine performance requirements, and physical and chemical tests required by the military and by the leading automobile manufacturers. Specifications for passenger car automatic transmission fluids are also examined, as are synthetic aircraft lubricants for commercial and military use.

This paper describes the continued development of a membrane-based subsystem designed to recover up to 99.5% of the water from various spacecraft waste waters. Specifically discussed are 1) the design and fabrication of an energy-efficient reverse-osmosis (RO) breadboard subsystem; 2) data showing the performance of this subsystem when operated on a synthetic wash-water solution-including the results of a 92-day test; and 3) the results of pasteurization studies, including the design and operation of an in-line pasteurizer. Also included in this paper is a discussion of the design and performance of a second RO stage. This second stage results in higher-purity product water at a minimal energy requirement and provides a substantial redundancy factor to this subsystem.

The purpose of this SAE Aerospace Information Report (AIR) is to present a quantitative approach for evaluating the performance and capabilities of an Engine Monitoring System (EMS). The value of such a methodology is in providing a systematic means to accomplish the following: 1 Determine the impact of an EMS on key engine supportability indices such as Fault Detection Rate, Fault Isolation Rate, Mean Time to Diagnose, In-flight Shutdowns (IFSD), Mission Aborts, and Unscheduled Engine Removals (UERs). 2 Facilitate trade studies during the design process in order to compare performance versus cost for various EMS design strategies, and 3 Define a “common language” for specifying EMS requirements and the design features of an EMS in order to reduce ambiguity and, therefore, enhance consistency between specification and implementation.

The purpose of this SAE Aerospace Information Report (AIR) is to present a quantitative approach for evaluating the performance and capabilities of an Engine Monitoring System (EMS).

This paper describes a payload concept that is intended to better manage energy resources and enhance mission return. The payload reduces onboard data using multiple signal processing modes. Each mode is selected based on the available power resources and incoming data rate. Through software simulation, the concept is compared to the more conventional single processing mode and “unprocessed” approaches. For the chosen application, the multiple mode approach is shown to have higher performance metrics than the single mode approaches. Additionally, a significant 99.7% to a modest 4.79% net savings in energy is estimated when compared to the “unprocessed” approach.

To achieve high thermal-to-electric energy conversion efficiency, it is desirable to operate thermoelectric generator devices over large temperature gradients and also to maximize the thermoelectric performance of the materials used to build the devices. However, no single thermoelectric material is suitable for use over a very wide range of temperatures (~300-1000K). It is therefore necessary to use different materials in each temperature range where they possess optimum performance. This can be achieved in two ways: 1) multistage thermoelectric generators where each stage operates over a fixed temperature difference and is electrically insulated but thermally in contact with the other stages 2) segmented generators where the p- and n-legs are formed of different segments joined in series. The concept of integrating new thermoelectric materials developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory into a segmented thermoelectric unicouple has been introduced in earlier publications.

CONTINUOUS increase in the power output of aircraft engines introduces from time to time lubricating problems including excessive wear and scuffing, excessive oxidation of the oil, and ring sticking. The one problem of ring sticking was chosen and the discussion is limited to the testing of lubricating oils to compare their abilities to prevent this type of failure. Although the best answer as to the ring-sticking tendencies of a lubricant rests with the full-scale engine in service, a simple test is needed during the development period. The development work which led up to the selection of an L-head CFR engine for a ring-sticking test is discussed. Various criteria used for detecting incipient ring sticking are mentioned and a method for direct measurement of incipient ring sticking is described.