Critical Thinking: How Aviation Turned Energy Crisis into a Sputnik Moment

The oil embargo of 1973 was a miserable period when American towns banned Christmas lights to save electricity, billboards urged citizens to “turn off the damn lights,” and filling stations dispensed gasoline “by appointment only” to “regular customers.” Like the Sputnik launch 15 years before, the crisis shocked the nation and got Americans thinking seriously about innovation and energy security. Businesses and the government started searching together for radical new ways to improve fuel efficiency.

One such program was NASA’s quest to develop an energy-efficient engine for commercial aircraft known as the E³ (E-cubed) program. GE joined early on and the resulting improvements in fuel efficiency and weight reduction changed the economics of aviation forever. “This multi-year development program for a more efficient turbofan engine core formed the basis for the GE90 engine, which is the most reliable and energy efficient engine in its class,” says Dale Carlson, general manager for technology strategy at GE Aviation.

Carlson says that NASA’s $200 million investment in the late 1970s and the early 1980s enabled a $3 billion investment by the industry in generations of high-bypass turbofans like the GE90-115B, the world’s largest and most powerful jet engine, the GEnx for the Dreamliner and the GE9X engine, which is currently in development. The GE90 and GEnx engines already generated billions in sales and could support thousands of jobs over 30 years, Carlson estimates.

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The E³ program helped GE develop the experimental GE36 open rotor engine in the 1980s. It used carbon fiber composite blades and a hybrid design combining turbofan and turboprop engines. It demonstrated fuel savings of more than 30 percent compared with similar-sized jet engines with conventional fan systems.
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GE never launched its engine commercially, though it was recognized worldwide as a technology breakthrough. The composite blade technology now serves inside GE’s latest engines like the GEnx.
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Besides the engine core, the E³ program also helped GE design and build the first jet engine with light, carbon-fiber composite fan blades. (The design was so appealing that one blade is now on display inside New York’s Museum of Modern Art.). “There are few, if any, technologies flying today that did not benefit from this strategic partnership” between NASA and the U.S. aerospace industry, said John Kinney, director of advanced programs business development at GE Aviation.

NASA recently invited GE to take part in a new development program that is building on the E³'s legacy. The program will focus on fast-tracking advanced composite materials through certification and regulatory acceptance. The goal is to reduce the time it takes to certify composite materials for aerospace use from the typical decade to two years. Companies involved in the new research include Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and others.

GE will be on its fourth-generation of carbon fiber composite fan blades by the time the GE9X enters service later in this decade. The engine will have only 16 blades, down from 22 inside the GE90-115B, even though its 11-foot diameter will top the older engine. The blades together with a new composite fan case and lightweight ceramic matrix composite (CMCs) materials inside the engine will remove hundreds of pounds from the machine and improve fuel efficiency.

CMCs are yet another material that GE and partners developed in conjunction with NASA. (One version was designed to patch up in orbit debris damage to the Space Shuttle fleet.) The latest version on the material now serves in the turbine of the LEAP engine, which GE makes in a joint venture with Snecma (Safran). CMCs can perform at temperatures as high as 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit – in hotter conditions than any alloy can handle. One version of the LEAP engine is currently being tested at GE’s testing facility in Peebles, Ohio. Commercial service is planned for 2016 and airlines have already ordered more than 5,400 LEAP engines valued over $70 billion.

Say Carlson: “The U.S. needs to be shaping paradigm-shifting technology to avoid having others shape it for us.”