Word: compressors
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Until recently, jet engines had only one essential moving part: the rotor. The forward end of its shaft spins an air compressor, which usually looks like a series of small windmills on the rear end of the shaft. High-pressure air from the last windmill goes to the combustion chambers where the fuel is burned. Hot gases formed there spin a turbine. The turbine turns the compressor, and the gases that pass through it shoot out the tailpipe in a high-speed jet whose reaction pushes the airplane forward...
This simple design has a bad limitation. All the rows of blades in the single compressor must revolve at the same speed. This works all right up to a compression ratio of about eight to one. Above this ratio single compressors are found to be inefficient, even though they may have as many as 16 rows of blades. Since the efficiency of the engine depends largely on the pressure of its incoming air, the single compressor sets a limit to the engine's performance...
Before developing the Sapphire and the Javelin, Sopwith faced two major decisions: 1) should the engine's compressor be axial flow or centrifugal?; 2) should the plane be delta-winged or twin-boomed (like the U.S.'s old P-38)? He chose axial flow, even though Sir Frank Whittle, who pioneered jets, advised the other; Sopwith thinks the Sapphire proved his own judgment right. His choice of delta-wing at first shocked Sopwith's crack designer, Sydney Camm, who dashed off to Yorkshire to seek "The Skipper," crying: "I won't have...
...Other garden gadgets are also getting a big play. Food Machinery & Chemical Corp., for example, is doing a big business with small tractors ($129 and up) to which some 30 different attachments can be hitched-including a saw, a snowplow and blower, and an air compressor which can be used for spraying paint or insecticides or for greasing a car. Another Food Machinery device: the "Trim Master" ($45), which sucks up ragged grass along borders and snips...
More than the usual number of time-consuming bugs have cropped up in airplane production. At one factory making jet fighters, about 100 planes are ready for delivery as soon as faulty compressor pumps can be replaced. The Boeing B-47 stratojet bomber, plagued with bugs since the first day it flew, is now having trouble with fuel tanks and landing gear...