- A jet engine is made up of basically four main parts and these are the intake, the compression, the combustion, and the exhaust. At the front of the jet engine the intake occurs through the intake nacelle. Air flows into the nacelle and strikes the compressor blades and starts turning them, thus drawing in more air into narrower and narrower blades and compressing the inflowing air. The jet engine has at the intake a set of turbine blades that are fashioned to draw the air in. The blades increase in pitch so that air that has been drawn in is compressed and is under high pressure as it travels past the intake turbine blades.
- This highly compressed air then passes into the next chamber that has fuel injected into it and burned. The compressed air flowing through this chamber acts as a catalyst providing oxygen for the burning fuel. A jet engine works by taking air in (intake) and expelling (exhaust) it under more force than it came in. Next, this pressurized air mixed with fuel, which is burning into the combustion chamber in roughly the center of the turbine assembly, is then expelled out the exhaust of the jet engine.
- Unlike the internal combustion piston engine the fuel is not ignited by a timed ignition sequence, but rather is continually burnt as the compressed air flows through the chamber and becomes the catalyst to enable to fuel to continue burning. It is for this reason that jets can actually burn a lower octane fuel than cars or radial engine propeller driven airplanes). Once the air and fuel mixture is ignited the resulting expansion of gases drives the exhaust turbines as the gases are expelled out the rear of the turbo jet creating the thrust of the jet engine.
- Newton's third law of physics, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, comes into play here. Once the fuel is burnt the super heated expanding air is forced out of the exhaust of the jet engine, which is then moved in the opposite direction, that is, forwards.
Comments
av8va said
on 1/19/2009 This explanation of How a Jet Engine Works is so full of errors that it would take more space than I have here to correct it. About the only thing that's right is that air comes in through one end and exits through the other end. An A for effort, but unfortunately, the author obviously knows nothing about aviation or aircraft engines. My qualifications for commenting: 38 years as a pilot, over 30 years as a senior technical writer/editorand several years in the Engineering and Development Engine Test Departments at GE Aircraft Engines.