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Aircraft Engine Thrust Calculations
Aircraft Engine Thrust Calculations
In this section, we deal with one of the forces acting on an aircraft, namely, the thrust produced by the aircraft's engine. In the first part of this section we will look at propellers and their efficiency. In the second part of this section, we will provide the formula for the thrust of a jet engine.
where: = thrust (lb) = velocity (ft/s) = engine brake horsepower 550 = conversion factor from ft-lbs to horsepower = propeller efficiency
The figure below shows the inlet and exhaust flows of the turbojet. The negative thrust due to bringing the freestream air almost to rest just ahead of the engine is called momentum drag or ram drag. The resulting thrust is given by following equation,
where: = is weight flow rate of the air passing through the engine. = jet stream velocity = static pressure across propelling nozzle = atmospheric pressure = propelling nozzle area = aircraft speed