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Concept
Airbreathing jet engine
Summary
An airbreathing jet engine (or ducted jet engine) is a jet engine in which the exhaust gas which supplies jet propulsion is atmospheric air, which is taken in, compressed, heated, and expanded back to atmospheric pressure through a propelling nozzle. Compression may be provided by a gas turbine, as in the original turbojet and newer turbofan, or arise solely from the ram pressure of the vehicle's velocity, as with the ramjet and pulsejet.
All practical airbreathing jet engines heat the air by burning fuel. Alternatively a heat exchanger may be used, as in a nuclear-powered jet engine. Most modern jet engines are turbofans, which are more fuel efficient than turbojets because the thrust supplied by the gas turbine is augmented by bypass air passing through a ducted fan.
The original air-breathing gas turbine jet engine was the turbojet. It was a concept brought to life by two engineers, Frank Whittle in England UK and Hans von Ohain in Germany. The turbojet compresses and heats air and then exhausts it as a high speed, high temperature jet to create thrust. While these engines are capable of giving high thrust levels, they are most efficient at very high speeds (over Mach 1), due to the low-mass-flow, high speed nature of the jet exhaust.
Modern turbofans are a development of the turbojet; they are basically turbojets that include a new section called the fan stage. Rather than using all their exhaust gases to provide direct thrust like a turbojet, turbofan engines extract some of the power from the exhaust gases inside the engine and use it to power the fan stage. The fan stage accelerates a large volume of air through a duct, bypassing the engine core (the actual gas turbine component of the engine), and expelling it at the rear as a jet, creating thrust. A proportion of the air that comes through the fan stage enters the engine core rather than being ducted to the rear, and is thus compressed and heated; some of the energy is extracted to power the compressors and fans, while the remainder is exhausted at the rear.
Official source
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