Chinese engines anyone?
 

It makes sense for the Chinese to produce their own engines, but in a field where the big players have been doing so for decades with all the involved improvement and quality enhancements, i can see a new player have a steep learning curve.
China launches own aircraft engine-maker to rival the West - BBC News

I hope GE, Rolls etc have good cyber security

I was about to say this! Chinese are like copy paste type.

Are any Western manufacturers licence-building aero engines in China?

Several commercial vehicle and component manufacturers have gone down the route of licence-building only to have the local factories create their own designs.

Travel, company laptop/phone and one night stands with cute girls never good corporate security. $Billions on cyber security cannot overcome human weaknesses.

Jet engine is nothing but bunch of cases, discs, blades and tubes of different materials and sizes. 3D imaging and metallurgy analysis is good enough to reverse engineer the hardware. Girls will get the control module software.

Well the Russians have tried to compete on engines for years and have always stuggled - the sort of stuff you can copy IS important but not as important as the quality of the supply chain for every item on the engine - and that you can't copy

Nothing to worry about there - the Chinese will have already had all the GE & RR plans for the last 20 years. Guess what a Chinese jet engine will look exactly like? :E

The problem is not just the the designs. It is the actual materials that are used in the engines. Does China make enough of the really high quality alloys, seals and so on? I imagine that reverse engineering to get the correct metallurgy of some of those parts would be a challenge.

The Chinese have been license producing Russian engines for military use for decades, often featuring some very exotic metals to avoid the complexity of internally cooled rotors/stators, adaptive tip clearances etc etc.

I think they'll figure it out.

The Russians haven't (yet). Western engines are clearly far better than their Russian counterparts - better fuel burn, more reliable, less maintenance - and it's due in large part to the metallurgy.

Perhaps some of it is just different mindset?

Cheap throwaway engines seem to have always worked for them. Not too sure about less maintenance.

It's more than metallurgy and aero design.

Manufacturing processes are hard to understand, let alone replicate, when you're on the outside looking in. 3+ decades ago Brand A was building an engine on a gov't contract, so the gov't owned the drawings. The gov't decided to second-source the engine, and turned drawings over to Brand B.

A vs B Parts looked alike, measured alike, but B's parts failed endurance tests. They differed at the intergranular level, which B was unable to achieve. :uhoh:

I work for Rolls-Royce in the UK and from what I hear we get over 40 cyber attacks from the far east everyday.

Don't sell the Russian technology short. After the Soviet Union collapse, we learned a whole new library of airfoil design from Rybinsk engineers!

That is true if Chinese has no knowledge about aerospace metallurgy. When you don't have the fundamental research cost, you have lot of money to play with final product. Most likely these engines will be adapted for military where there is no risk of bad publicity.

Or they can always pull a proven Loral trick. Bid so cheap to lure one western engine maker to move production to China, build sloppy engines which keep failing, pressure builds up, they get tired and copy original drawings and specs. Oops, too late.

Typical BBC accuracy. So China gets engines from GE and P&W do they. No mention of RR then.
Rolls-Royce wins $1.5bn Trent 700 order from China Eastern Airlines ? Rolls-Royce

Once gotten ahold of, the girls usually referred to the control module as firmware. :E

Suggest you guys look at Chinese achievements & intentions in Space before
writing off their engine efforts.
John

Absolutely right: dismiss Chinese efforts at your peril.

Better to assume they'll get there through hard work, investment in technology and some subterfuge (much of which will only confuse their issues, we hope).

The Chinese have been very very succesful in Optical networking technology , very advanced optical engineeerign probablyas complex as the metalurgy for Jet engines but, a big BUT a much more benign failure environment , ie send a guy ina van to chaneg some cards not deal with an engine exploding at V!.

However the point is they do have very high tech processes allied to their shall we say 'design ingenuity.

A huge amount of the UK network is built on this equipment , rather foolishly in my opinion since our US ciousins have effectively banned the deployment of the same equipment on US telecoms networks after a modest percentage of contract wins buy the Chinese .

Also the idea of co production.licences. JVs are just a slippery slope to unintentional technology transfer with China , I ahve had 30 plus years dealing with them and because they take along term view on everything they usually come out on top of these activities.

So Messrs GE/RR/PW keep as much production and Rand D in your traditional homes and keep that materials technology well hidden