Wide Body, Blade-Out Jet Engine Test
Why Aviation Stack Exchange recommends it
Aviation Stack Exchange answerers point people to it as a quick visual of what a blade-out test looks like and how violently an engine destroys itself when a blade lets go.
Recommended by 1 people across 1 different months, 2015 to 2018.
What it is
A 34-second clip of a blade-out test on a wide-body jet engine, where a small explosive charge separates one fan blade to simulate a fatigue failure. The engine passes if its casing contains all the debris. It was uploaded by the YouTube user dknric in 2009.
What people said
Recommends Ezekiel Kruglick · 2015-04 · Aviation Stack Exchange · on “What are the indications that your turbofan engine has "thrown a blade?"”
engineer and pilot here - formerly of JPL. I've seen blade loss tests and any modern high performance engine will violently destroy itself if a blade is lost. You can see tests of this on youtube [this video] for example at that link or by searching on "jet engine blade-out test" (without the quotes). (User fooot gave a longer example video as well.) In these tests they typically use a (very small, prebalanced) explosive charge to separate one blade from the spindle and then the engine vibrates itself to pieces. Modern engines are constructed near the very limits of the materials used. In fact there is a special joint venture company [LINK] in the US that makes a lot of the fan blades and which e
Cites KeithS · 2015-07 · Aviation Stack Exchange · on “How do engine manufacturers minimize damage from bird strikes?”
Placement on aircraft that fly above birds. This is the #1 reason we don't hear about airliner bird strikes every day on the news; cruise altitude for airliners is around 30,000 feet, while only two species of bird have ever been recorded flying at that height, one in Central Africa, the other around the Himalayas, neither of these being common travel lanes for airliners. The critical time for most bird strikes is below the cloud ceiling and/or transition altitude, above which the air becomes thinner and birds have to work harder to stay aloft. Thus most birds fly below transition, while airliners spend as much of their flight time as feasible above it as the thinner air reduces drag and low
Cites Vikki · 2018-11 · Aviation Stack Exchange · on “Why do uncontained engine failures still occur?”
One of the absolute requirements of an aircraft turbine engine (usually some sort of turbofan or turboprop) installation is that, in the event of a destructive failure of the engine, the engine cowling must be able to contain any and all fragments released in the process. In layman’s terms: engine blow up, engine parts stay in cowling. The cowling’s ability to contain an engine disintegration must be demonstrated in testing [this video] . All of this has been the case, without exception, for decades. [LINK] And, yet, uncontained [LINK] engine [LINK] failures [LINK] continue [LINK] to occur [LINK] . As recently as October 2016 [LINK] , a 767’s engine exploded during takeoff. (Yes, I know about the