Bala Vignesh wrote:check out what the Good Karnail Sahab has said on the Kaveri flight test in his blog.
Karnail's Blog
Ah.. The Good Karnail despite protestations to the contrary cannot make out the difference between wet thrust and dry thrust even if someone hits him on the face with a wet towel and tells him about it, nor can he ever realize that a flat rated engine putting out 65KN is probably equivalent to a 80KN ISA that the brochures of the others suggest. A GE 404 on a carrier in the Indian ocean at 40C is sure as hell not putting out the 75/80KN whatever is the advertised figure, while this SDRE engine will guarantee 65KN or whatever it is putting out currently.
That said, what the program will give is the confidence of having "been there/done that kind of thing" in developing a fully functional and proven engine. More than the French getting their core, what GTRE/DRDO desperately needs to do is to tap into the vendor base in US and Europe of the PW, GE, RR, Snecma and MTU for stuff like blisks and latest material for hot sections (turbines, combustor, A/B etc) and get the engine core's thermodynamic efficiency up to the levels of the EJ200/M88-3 or better.
The current core is obviously too large and the core flow is too high , but with better materials and getting the pressure ratio and TET up, the Kabini core could become the "Gangotri" able to power a "Ganga" sized engine. Sure for for MCA/LCA kind of applications, using an off the shelf high tech /latest materials kind of tinku , chikna core should do the job, if mated to the existing Kaveri LP system.
If they do go with Snecma to come up with a Kaveri with the Snecma core, what I do hope is that the resulting engine has all blisk compressor stages, contra rotating LP and HP spools, latest materials and TB coatings and film cooling giving one highest TETs around and an overall pressure ratio of 30+. And oh.. don't go for a piddly 70/80 kn engine, go for a 110KN/125KN class engine, coming out in around 2015 time frame, if the babu monkeys sign off on 2011 or so and give the "No Objection Certificate" (got to hand it to 'em Yindoos, this No Objection business is profound, as profound and pill-o-soppical as the zero/shunya/nothingness. After all, it is only a culture that can imagine and invent zero can invent something like the "no objection", all others will have invented only an "objection certificate") in triplicate and laminate it and get it notarized by a govt officer notified in the presidential gazette.
The current Kaveri core with infusion of the latest materials and technologies can be used as the building block of other engines for other applications.