Experience in the design of small-size gas-turbine engines for unmanned aerial vehicles

This paper is concerned with low-thrust air-feed jet engines, which are used in unmanned and manned aerial vehicles, power plants, etc. The paper presents an overview of existing aerial vehicles that use low-thrust air-feed jet engines of various types. Consideration is given to the basic construction and schematic diagrams of gas-turbine engines of thrust 100 to 3,000 N. Experience in the design, making, and operation of air-feed jet engines as a part of unmanned aerial vehicles for various purposes is overviewed. The features of existing low-thrust engines are identified. It is shown that parametric data on low-thrust air-feed jet engines should be refined, supplemented, and collated with their unification in mind. The thrust and specific performance characteristics of currently available engines and the trends in their refinement are presented. The correctness of the methodological approaches to this study is verified by comparison with other authors’ results. The goal of this study is to identify the main lines of design and making of low-thrust air-feed jet engines for unmanned aerial vehicles and the trends in their refinement and use. The novelty of this study lies in obtaining new data on the effect of the unmanned aerial vehicle parameters, purpose, and flight conditions on the choice of the low-thrust gas-turbine engine type, component units, and key characteristics. The obtained results allow one to identify the range of the work process parameters of engines in specifying the requirements for and the design of the main units and the engine as a whole. The practical significance of the results lies in the possibility of using the obtained data in designing small-size gas-turbine engines for unmanned aerial vehicles and in refining computational procedures.