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Designers of Advanced Aircraft Engine PD-35 to Waive Hydromech Governor

Rubric: Russia, Future

The advanced super-thrust turbojet engine PD-35 will need development of 15-17 critical technologies of automatic control system. In particular, designers will put aside the backup hydromechanical governor while laying the whole responsibility upon an electronic unit, Sergey Ostapenko, head designer of ODK-STAR told Mil.Press Today.

"An up-to-date engine can’t do without an up-to-date control system. Designing of such kind of system is among the critical technologies", said Sergey Ostapenko. "What we have now on the table is a future control system for PD-35. In fact, it is a breakthrough into the unknown. A radically new system with new approaches must be developed. That’s the only way to create the revolutionary engines", he added.

PD-14 engine

The expert emphasized that the PD-35 engine would be based on the blueprints made during creation of the PD-14 engine. While designing of the engine for the MS-21 passenger liner, engineers had mastered at least 15 critical technologies.
"PD-14 is the first Russian engine where an electronic unit is responsible for everything. Conceptually, it has no backup hydromech governor at all. What can be critical in the engine operation is electronic failure, but the system is so much reliable that it bears all the responsibility", said the ODK-STAR’s head designer.
According to Sergey Ostapenko, the second essential issue in the work over PD-35 will be extended service life. Pumping unit’s life will be at least 20,000 hours; other components will live even longer, 40,000 hours.

"Working on the new engine, we would probably design an electrically-driven system or a distributed one. Such issues are to be resolved in foreseeable future. Totally, we have at least fifteen critical technologies ahead in the PD-35 project", commented Sergey Ostapenko.

Another radically new challenge the engineers will have to handle is related to cost reduce of the powerplant’s overall life cycle.
"This task is uncommon not only practically, but even theoretically, too. Now we only study designing methodologies for engines with preset life cycle cost", added the head designer.
The PD-35 engine will allow putting aside the four-engine design on Il-476, Il-478, Il-96-400 and become the basic engine for the advanced military transport aircraft. It is planned to mount the engine on the Russian-Chinese wide-body airplane as well.