A Rolls-Royce executive said yesterday the company has achieved significant improvement in its T56 engine series 3.5 upgrade program.
Tom Hartmann, Rolls-Royce senior vice president of government programs, told reporters yesterday during a briefing that the T56 3.5 engine kit was “fully vetted and tested” in the company’s Indianapolis, Ind., -based facility about 18 months ago. Hartmann added the company proved on an instrumented test cell that it got the fuel efficiency, lowering of temperature and power increase it believed it could achieve.
“In fact, we achieved all the goals of the program,” Hartmann said. “It’s about an 8-percent improvement in Specific Fuel Consumption, about 9-percent improvement in power, if you don’t take the life improvement, and about a 10-percent improvement in life if you don’t use the power.”
Hartmann also said Rolls-Royce will test the engine kit next month on a C-130H cargo jet at Edwards AFB, Calif., to not only prove the flight integration, but to make sure the engine kit is safe and to get the flight qualification data. Hartmann also said the company will verify that it has the fuel and power improvements that the company is advertising.
Rolls-Royce spokesman George McLaren said in an email the company funded development of the upgrade while the Air Force provided funding to carry out the flight tests.
The T56 engine is a single shaft, modular design, turboprop engine with a 14-stage axial flow compressor drive by a four-stage turbine unit. The gearbox has two stages of gear reduction, features a propeller brake and is connected to the power section by a torquemeter assembly. Other engine modules are the can-annular type combustor and the accessory drive housing.
Since the T56 entered production in 1954, over 18,000 T56 and 501-D (commercial version) turboprops have been installed on a variety of propeller-driven aircraft, including Lockheed Martin’s [LMT] C-130 and L-100 transport aircraft, Northrop Grumman’s [NOC] E-2 early warning aircraft and Lockheed Martin’s P-3 anti-submarine warfare aircraft.