Rotorcraft propulsion for year 2000 plus

The objective of this study was to identify high-payoff technologies for year 2000 small gas turbine engines for rotorcraft application. A current state-of-the-art technology Allison gas turbine engine was used as a baseline and three advanced concepts were studied: the simple cycle engine, a waste heat recovery cycle, and a wave rotor engine cycle. For the simple cycle engine, two general arrangements were considered: the traditional concentric spool arrangement and a nonconcentric spool arrangement. Both a regenerative and a recuperative cycle were studied for the waste heat recovery cycle. An extensive cycle optimization procedure was performed for each configuration under study using relative direct operating cost (DOC) as the figure of merit. A high pressure ratio nonconcentric engine provided the greatest reduction in DOC with a 16.5 percent improvement.