New Pratt & Whitney Canada boss John Saabas tells Brendan Gallagher that the Montreal-based engine-builder is ready to roll on a new 10,000lb-class powerplant for the business-jet market
“We’re ready to go as soon as we get a customer,” says John Saabas. “We’ve put together a product that we believe is low in development risk and is very attractive to the marketplace.”
Pratt & Whitney Canada executive VP Saabas recently took over the day-to-day running of the company from Alain Bellemare, who retains the presidency while taking on broad new responsibilities as EVP for strategy and development for the whole P&W group. A seasoned engineer whose last job was as senior VP for engineering and operations, Saabas is lower-key than the ebullient Bellemare but shares his predecessor’s ability to bring a vision to life.
“A lot of our airframer customers are positioning aircraft that fit into the longer-range, higher-speed large corporate category,” he says. “They will require a 10,000lb-thrust engine, and over the last three or four years we have developed the technologies needed for an engine that we think is world-class in terms of both fuel consumption and emissions.”
The company’s benchmark for improvements in the now crucial arena of emissions is its own PW307 turbofan, which powers the Dassault Falcon 7X. “The 307 rates 5 on the Zurich Scale, making it clean it enough to exempt the operator from landing fees, and its nitrous oxide (NOx) levels are 35 per cent below the CAAP requirement,” Saabas enthuses. “In the 10,000lb programme – we’re calling it the PW10K for the time being – we aim to do even better than that.” P&WC is also setting itself an ambitious noise target: “We want to get to Stage 3 minus 20 or 30 per cent.”
PW10K is no mere concept, Saabas insists. “We’ve spent a year and half in advanced design and the result is a lot more than a cartoon,” he says. “Because of the analysis and scrutiny our customers put us through, it’s impossible to bid an engine these days unless you have something very concrete - the only way to survive that is to have some detail done.”
P&WC has customer-proofed itself by carrying out an advanced design process to check things like rotor dynamics and lifing, resulting in what Saabas calls a “pre-detail” design. “It means we’re ready to launch detail design as soon as we have a go from a customer,” he says. “We would probably run hardware for the first time about 18 month from go-ahead, and certificate less than 30 months from that.”
The company is also sounding a confident note about the technology that would underlie the new engine. “First, we’ve got the best of what our US sister company can share with us - we’re adapting it to the slightly smaller engines that we do here,” says Saabas. “And then there are the results from our own Advanced Turbofan Integrator (ATFI) technology demonstrator effort over the last few years.”
The ATFI programme stands out from the crowd by virtue of its geared fan. This is intended to optimise the speeds of the fan and the low-pressure compressor and turbine, raising overall efficiency, allowing higher temperatures to be maintained, and ultimately improving fuel consumption. It won’t be part of PW10K, though: “We’re not proposing it because we think it’s more appropriate to anything we might do for the regional-jet sector,” Saabas explains.
But the new engine would benefit from the AFTI work on the compressor and the combustors. “The aerodynamics of the compressor are really at the heart of our new technology for this engine,” says Saabas. “We’ve kept the AFTI aerodynamic design but scaled up the hardware to match the bigger PW10K. Similarly, the combustors were developed under ATFI and have now also been brought up to the appropriate size.”
Source: Flight Daily News
