Navy Foreign Object Damage and Its Impact on Future Gas Turbine Engine Low Pressure Compression Systems

Foreign Object Damage (FOD), Domestic Object Damage (DOD), bird ingestion, and ice ingestion are all necessary factors to be considered in the design of reliable and maintainable fan systems for future U.S. Navy aircraft applications. The high rate of fan damage reported in U.S. Navy engines and its impact on repair and maintenance requirements such as engine down time, level of repair, and number of spares have caused the Navy in recent years to scrutinize the requirements which must be met in order to design a more reliable and rugged yet highly maintainable fan system for future aircraft.

This paper reports the results of an investigation into the occurrences of Foreign Object Damage in several U.S. Navy aircraft, the repair approaches presently used by the U.S. Navy, and investigates the implications which these considerations present to the design of more damage tolerant fan systems. It further investigates the trade-offs in future turbomachinery design which balance gas turbine engine performance payoff against supportability and maintainability onboard ship.