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Concept
Propfan
Summary
A propfan, also called an open rotor engine, or unducted fan (as opposed to a ducted fan), is a type of aircraft engine related in concept to both the turboprop and turbofan, but distinct from both. The design is intended to offer the speed and performance of a turbofan, with the fuel economy of a turboprop. A propfan is typically designed with a large number of short, highly twisted blades, similar to the (ducted) fan in a turbofan engine. For this reason, the propfan has been variously described as an "unducted fan" (UDF) or an "ultra-high-bypass (UHB) turbofan".
In the 1970s, Hamilton Standard described its propfan as "a small diameter, highly loaded multiple bladed variable pitch propulsor having swept blades with thin advanced airfoil sections, integrated with a nacelle contoured to retard the airflow through the blades thereby reducing compressibility losses and designed to operate with a turbine engine and using a single stage reduction gear resulting in high performance". In 1982, the weekly aviation magazine Flight International defined the propfan as a propeller with 8–10 highly swept blades that cruised at a speed of , although its definition evolved a few years later with the emergence of contra-rotating propfans.
In 1986, British engine maker Rolls-Royce used the term open rotor as a synonym for the original meaning of a propfan. This action was to delineate the propfan engine type from a number of ducted engine proposals at the time that had propfan in their names. By the 2000s, open rotor (OR) became a preferred term for propfan technology in research and news reports, with contra-rotating open rotor (CROR) also occasionally being used to distinguish between single-rotation propfans. As of 2015, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) defined an open rotor concretely (but broadly) as "a turbine engine fan stage that is not enclosed within a casing"; in contrast, it had only a working definition of an open rotor engine (the more commonly used term for propfan in the 21st century), calling it "a turbine engine featuring contra-rotating fan stages not enclosed within a casing.
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