Whittle

PJ Whittle, TL Blundell. Protein stracture-based drag design. Annu Rev Biophys Biomol Stract 23 349-375, 1994. 

Feilden and Hawthorne [3] describe Whittle s early thinking in their excellent biographical memoir on Whittle for the Royal Society. 

The idea for the turbojet did not come to Whittle suddenly, but over a period of some years initially while he was a final year flight cadet at RAF Cranwell about 1928 subsequently as a pilot officer in a fighter squadron and then... 

But the idea of gas turbine itself can be traced back to a 1791 patent by Barber, who wrote of the basic concept of a heat engine for power generation. Air and gas were to be compressed and burned to produce combustion products these were to be used to drive a turbine producing a work output. The compressor could be driven independently (along the lines of Whittle s early thoughts) or by the turbine itself if it was producing enough work. 

Stodola in his great book of 1925 [4] describes several gas turbines for power generation, and Whittle spent much time studying this work carefully. Stodola tells how in 1904, two French engineers, Armengaud and Lemale, built one of the first gas turbines, but it did little more than turn itself over. It appears they used some steam injection and the small work output produced extra compressed air-but not much. The overall efficiency has been estimated at 2-3% and the effective work output at 6-10kW. 

I first became interested in the subject of cycles when I went on sabbatical leave to MIT, from Cambridge England to Cambridge Mass. There I was asked by the Director of the Gas Turbine Laboratory, Professor E.S.Taylor, to take over his class on gas turbine cycles for the year. The established text for this course consisted of a beautiful set of notes on cycles by Professor (Sir) William Hawthorne, who had been a member of Whittle s team. Hawthorne s notes remain the best starting point for the subject and I have called upon them here, particularly in the early part of Chapter 3. 

I must express my appreciation to many colleagues in the Whittle Laboratory of the Engineering Department at Cambridge University. In particular I am grateful to Professor John Young who readily made available to me his computer code for real gas cycle calculations and to Professors Cumpsty and Denton for their kindness in extending to me the hospitality of the Whittle Laboratory after I retired as Vice-Chancellor of the Open University. It is a stimulating academic environment. 

Whittle, Sir Frank. (1945), The early history of the Whittle jet propulsion engine, Proc. Inst. Mech. Engrs. 152,419-435. 

Whittle, Sir Frank. (1981), Gas Turbine Aero-Themodynamics. Pergamon Press, Oxford. 

It was therefore of some interest to so modify the molecule as to maximize this particular activity at the expense of the side effects. In much the same vein as the work on cocaine, the structural requirements for the desired activity had at one time been whittled down to embrace in essence an a-substituted phenylacetic acid ester of ethanolamine (S3). 

The jet engine was invented independently by two people Frank Whittle in England and Dr. Hans von Ohain in Germany. In 1928, as a student at the Royal Air Force technical college at Cranwell, Frank Wliittle wrote a senior thesis entitled Future... 

English inventor Frank Whittle patents the basic design of the turbojet engine. 

The Whittle jet engine is flown from Britain to the United States and provides the model for the first practical American jet engines that will be built by General Electric. 

The role of the gas turbine is more familiar to many of us in the aircraft field. However, since Sir Frank Whittle invented the jet engine in the early pioneering years before the Second World War there has been rapid development in both output and efficiency of these machines, and today the gas turbine is a popular choice for electricity generation. 

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