Aircraft Propulsion, 2nd Edition

Preface

Intended Audience

This book is intended to provide a foundation for the analysis and design of aircraft engines. The target audience for this book is upper classmen, undergraduates, and first-year graduate students in aerospace and mechanical engineering. The practicing engineers in the gas turbine and aircraft industry will also benefit from the integration and system discussions in the book. Background in thermodynamics and fluid mechanics at a fundamental level is assumed.

Motivation

In teaching under graduate and graduate propulsion courses for the past 23 years, I accumulated supplemental notes on topics that were not covered in most of our adopted textbooks. The supplemental materials ranged from issues related to the propulsion system integration into aircraft to the technological advances that were spawned by research centers around the world. I could have continued handing out supplemental materials to the textbooks to my classes, except that I learned that the presentation style to undergraduate students had to be (peda-gogically) different than for the graduate students. For example, leaving out many steps in derivations of engineering principles can lead to confusion for most undergraduate students. Although it is more important to grasp the underlying principles than the mechanics of some derivations, but if we lose the students in the derivation phase, they may lose sight of the underlying principles as well. Another motivation for attention to details ...