Re: the real WZ 10
So, engine now more important than steppers ?
Chinese engine technology is relatively advanced, the most advanced in Asia and perhaps only the USA, Russia, the UK and France have more advanced engine technology. In 10 years time .... I'd bet would be no.3
Overly optimistic, plus only comparing to the weak doesn't prove much. The French and British have developed engines for the Concorde 40 years ago. The Chinese till this day haven't achieved it. If China was as advanced as you said, it wouldn't be using such antiquated bomber as the H-6, neither would it be still trying to import transporters like the Il-76.
Jet engines are state of the art masterpieces, even the American and Russians spent decades and trillions of investments in order to get it right. It's not as easy as just blathering and self proclaim, neither was Rome built in just one day. Currently China's problem is not lack of money or talent, it's just the sedimentation of experience and historical know-how. China has a lot of the finest engineers and the backing of the richest government. The problem is that a lot of the times, the blueprints came out and the manufacturing test-runs cannot meet the expectation of the original design.
On 2 April 2009, the director of AVIC (Aviation Industry Corporation of China) Lin Zuoming (林左鸣), stated that there were problems with the quality control procedures on the WS-10A production line, meaning the Taihang turbofan was still of unsatisfactory quality. He said that solving these problems would be a key step.[7] In addition to poor build quality, the engines suffered from poor reliability, the Chinese engines have been lasting 30 hours at a time vs 400 for the Russian originals.[8] Despite AVIC's issues with quality control, mass production of the WS-10 series engines would contribute significantly in improving Chinese industrial capabilities.[9]
This is quoted from Wikipedia, which itself are direct quotes from several prestigious sources. If you guys are interested, go check out the WS-10 post on wiki.
This example reflects the root of the problem, again, a problem from lack of experience, instead of lack of money or academic know-how.
On the other hand, the British, to a great extent, is even stronger than the Russians in the jet engine business. Since the fall of the USSR, the big bureaus in Russia haven't really advanced much, other than simply keep on revising the old designs. All of the current hot selling Russian engines date back to the old USSR. But the British came out with a lot of great engines, both in military and civil sectors. A380 , F35, Typhoon and even the new British large aircraft carrier will use RR engines.
Plus, a helo engine is no easier than a full fledged fighter jet engine. In fact, even harder in some ways, since it's not as crucial as fighter jet turbofans, hence attracting less backing and funding.
Of course China had made big strides in the last decade, but it still has too much catch up to do. Just the quality itself will keep bothering Chinese engineers for at least another 10 years. These things are not easy to solve, both polar bear and uncle yankee struggled for decades before they fully resolved the problems. And this coupled with mass scale production. With China current production scale, it will be even harder with such small production batches.
---------- Post added at 03:15 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:07 PM ----------
China is working with France to produce the WZ-16 turboshaft engine (1500kw 1800+shp) that is scheduled to enter in to mass production in 2014 then the WZ-10 should be able to carry the same amount of weapons as the AH-64.
The French are not dumb and neither are they selfless. I'm curious to see how much of the final product is actually China's. Right now China has a craze for wanting to claim everything to be 100% indigenous, which in most cases is not true. Most engines aboard the new warships, including the 054A & 052C, were imported. Even some of the missiles on the J-11/Su-27 series fighters still use imported Russian missiles.
All of you here probably heard similar saying, it is better to give a person a fishnet than to give him the fish. It would be great if China could learn from the French, in terms of management and quality control, improving their product perfection rate and service reliability, than to simply just buy the engine.
Right now China is standing at a very weird crossroad. As a country, China has a very solid industrial infrastructure, it can literally make everything and anything. But due to the chaos over the last century, especially the wasted first three decades caused by Mao, China is really late at a lot of modern innovations. Although China could make anything, it still require "insider trade secret" to make their products better, which it lacks due to inexperience. Hence, the cooperation with the French is a great learning opportunity for China.
