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776 HONG AND COLLOPY 6) Small, focused teams with minimal levels of management and strong leadership worked directly on the technologies in government and industry laboratories. 7) Open communications and high levels of trust between person- nel in the government and in the companies assured the companies that the government would safeguard their competitive advantages. 8) The government encouraged competitive development by the engine companies on common problems, even when not all of the companies were selected for particular contracts. 9) Development programs were tied into technology transition plans for systems applications with buy-in by the user communities, particularly the engine companies. 10) A sufficient number of development opportunities were avail- able for technology transfer, including military acquisition programs and commercial products. The evolving applications for engines in this period provided a path forward to anticipate technology needs. 11) Anticipated technology needs were prioritized so that plan- ning and execution could be brought to fruition at the correct time. Development program delays waiting for the “appropriate miracle” to occur were, for the most part, avoided. Beyond these management characteristics, several recurring themes were found in this case study’s examination of the history of aircraft engine development in the United States between 1960 and 1985. First, the primary value of basic research is to provide models, methods, and tools to predict the performance of a design con- figuration. Such tools allow designs to be refined before they are implemented in hardware. Examples are compressor aerodynamic models (leading to bet- ter stall-tolerant engines), advanced high cycle fatigue analyses for compressor and turbine blades, heat transfer models for hot section and cooled turbine blade designs, and computational fluid dynamic models leading to more efficient compressor blade designs. Note that many of these basic advances and models came out of govern- ment laboratories, in the U.S. Air Force and NASA. These advances did not draw the same attention as technologies that could be em- bodied in a piece of hardware (such as a variable compressor vane) passed around a conference table. Thus, they often do not get the credit they deserve as critical steps in the creation of today’s aircraft engine. However, in our interviews with technology managers, an- alytical models were consistently at or near the top of the list of critical developments during the 1960–1985 period. Basic research is often credited with discovering and harness- ing fundamental phenomena and thereby leading to technologies that apply the new phenomena to enhance products and systems (the linear model of technology development). However, we did not find technologies arising from basic research in this way during the period we investigated. Second, full-scale demonstrators matured technologies, proto- typed component designs, and explored system integration issues. They also vetted technologies, sometimes showing that investment in a once promising technology should be ended. These demon- strators were immensely valuable to technology development and transition. One example is the GE-1 core engine demonstrator in the early 1960s. The GE-1 developed several critical technologies for contem- porary engines and fathered two derivative demonstrators whose im- pact can be felt to the present day in military and commercial aircraft engines. Almost all of the profit stream of GE Aircraft Engines from 1980 to 2000 resulted from engines derived from these three demon- strators. The tests were funded by contributing engineering, an early form of IR&D, and the ATEGG program. Additional demonstrator programs at NASA in the 1970s also contributed technologies used on commercial engines. However, NASA full-scale demonstration programs began to be curtailed in the late 1970s, and component technology flowing from NASA into production aircraft engines has greatly slowed, if not nearly ceased. Third, tight knit teams with a vision, long term commitment, minimal hierarchy, and minimal oversight can discover and deliver major technical advances. Numerous examples of Skunkworks-type programs exist in both industry and government and are credited with advances such as the first variable geometry turbojet (J79) and the Mach 3 engines of the early 1960s (J58 and J93). More structured research programs, such as the IR&D program of the 1980s and IHPTET of the late 1980s and 1990s have featured bureaucracies on the industry and government sides who conduct systematic layered reviews of technology programs. These programs have notably not produced radical innovations that have transitioned to products in service. They have succeeded in introducing many in- cremental technological improvements, particularly in raising cycle temperature limits. On the other hand, IR&D, IHPTET, and other government-funded programs have invested decades of research into programs such as ceramic matrix composites, metal matrix composites, analytical sen- sor redundancy and performance seeking controls, many of which have so far not transitioned into production in a meaningful way, or at least to anticipated levels. These technologies have each survived dozens of annual reviews at many layers in industry and government. Why do small, independent teams succeed at radical innovations? We speculate that it may be because they have the freedom to persist in developing high-risk technologies that hierarchical organizations would abandon. Early on, the promise of radical technologies is not clear. Support of them is often a matter of faith as much as reason. This distinguishes radical from incremental advances. Thus, radical technologies cannot survive layers of reviews. They depend on champions and trust. When an agency funds a tight knit team and depends on trust rather than reviews and tollgates, there is a significant risk that, at the end of the day, there will be little to show for the investment. However, when layers of oversight and reviews are used, there is almost no chance of successful radical innovation. Too many participants hold veto power. Additionally, small tight knit teams can develop technology rapidly and inexpensively so that a much higher failure rate becomes tolerable. Fourth, a great deal of gas turbine technology development in the 1960s and 1970s came about to correct problems with engines already in service and was conducted as part of the product man- agement of the engine rather than through offline technology devel- opment programs. Examples such as the compressor stall and durability problems in the early TF30 and F100 turbofan engines for the F-111 and F-15 are classic cases. CIP funded most of the work to correct the deficiencies in these engines. One of the key technologies of this period, the ability to maintain the aerodynamic stability of a high- pressure compressor, particularly in a turbofan configuration, was developed primarily under CIP for these two engines. The TF30 and F100 experiences provide positive and negative lessons for spiral development. On the positive side, the engines were fielded with minimal capabilities and successively improved. In the case of the TF30, the improvements never brought the engine to a satisfactory level of performance. The premature retirement of the EF-111 Raven was largely due to the unreliable TF30. On the other hand, the current F100-229 is an excellent, very-high- performance fighter engine. On the negative side, the development of these engines in the field was very expensive and painful. The pain was due to performance falling short of promises, and this could be avoided in the best- managed spiral development programs. The cost impact is more intractable. Substantial time is required to develop and demonstrate technology improvements to aircraft engines. Every significant change to an engine requires lengthy requalification to ensure safety. Without major change to the product qualification process, the fre- quent product releases envisioned in the spiral development process cannot be as frequent or inexpensive in the aircraft engine domain as other types of products have experienced. This should provide cautionary deliberation to some proponents of spiral development. When considering the applicability of turbine engine research processes to other domains, it is important to note that the tur- bine engine is a system whose basic architecture has not changed since the 1960s. Nevertheless, in this period turbomachinery used in Brayton cycle engines has undergone refinements in aerodynamics,PDF Image | Technology for Jet Engines: A Case Study in Science and Technology Development
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