Turbojets

The wonderful story of the birth of jet engines, the main stage of which began to be written in the 1930s (apart from some other research work, carried out in Sweden or Switzerland, for example), took place essentially independently in two places on our planet. The first place was research conducted in Germany, especially at Heinkel, led by a major pioneer of this type of aircraft propulsion Dr. Hans von Ohain, who eventually won the imaginary battle for the first takeoff of the aircraft, powered exclusively by jet propulsion. Frank Whittle, in particular, can be considered the second imaginary father of the jet engine. And it is precisely these circumstances of the development of the first functional English jet engines, which significantly contributed to the current form of aircraft propulsion, that this article is devoted to.

In this article, I would like to elaborate a comprehensive and interesting history of the development of jet engines at the German airline Heinkel before and during World War II. world war. According to my current information (unlike the relatively well-known jet projects Jumo 004 and BMW 003), this topic has not been developed in the appropriate breadth in our country, which is why I decided to deal with this topic using mostly foreign language sources.

The following article describes the operation of the Junkers Jumo 004 aircraft jet engine. This is my translation of the original German manual from the end of period of World War II, which is accompanied by illustrative pictures.

The emergence of jet aircraft engines at the end of the 1930s was accompanied by completely new problems, which their designers had to solve in the development of this hitherto little-known type of technology. One of the issues was to ensure continuous combustion of the air / fuel mixture at constant pressure with sufficient efficiency. Of course, such an engine, like a piston engine, had to be started in some way and, according to the Brayton cycle, its internal continuous processes had to be started, which, however, required special (and often more complex) procedures for the jet engine. The following text will describe how the designers of the first German jet engines, which were at the end of World War II, coped with this interesting problem. World War II in several jet aircraft deployed in combat.

Even before A.M. Ljulka started working on the jet engine, similar work was done in England and Germany, that the first jet engines were tested here in 1937 and the first flight of the jet engine took place in Germany in 1939. But all this happened in deep secrecy. So A.M. Ljulka went this route alone and is rightly considered the founder of the development of jet engines in the USSR.