Prior art gas turbine engines often employ a fan to draw in a working fluid, typically air, a compressor to compress the working fluid entering the engine, a combustor to burn the compressed air mixed with fuel, and a turbine that extracts work from the working fluid exiting the engine. Each of the aforementioned engine sections is typically comprised of one or more stages of rotating blades and concomitant vanes to direct the working fluid and extract work from the hot combusted gases in order to drive the compressor and fan, thus providing an exhaust gas stream of high velocity (“jet”) to generate a propulsive force typically employed in aircraft flight.
Known gas turbine engines produce large amounts of thrust but are typically costly to operate and manufacture due to the necessity to burn large quantities of jet fuel to drive the turbine. Additionally, the pollutants produced as a byproduct of jet fuel combustion are undesirable. Since the gas passing through the engine aft of the combustor is quite hot, all engine components are subjected to tremendous heat. Furthermore, the rotating components of a gas turbine engine have very high rotational velocities, that, when coupled with thermal expansion and impacts caused by normal engine operation cause them to rub or interfere with the static portions of the turbine. These inherent features of modern gas turbines render them quite costly to produce, as all components must be produced to extremely tight tolerances and be capable of withstanding enormous thermal and mechanical stresses.
Additionally, many prior art rotor and stator assemblies are quite complex, having a multiplicity of parts required to render the assembly capable of containing a high-pressure air stream and operate under a wide variety of power, speed, and atmospheric conditions. The cost and complexity of designing and constructing such prior art assemblies is quite prohibitive.
The present invention provides an improvement to the prior art by replacing the combustor and turbine of a conventional gas turbine engine with one or more electromagnetically driven compressive stages in order to provide the high velocity gas stream for propulsion while enhancing the operating efficiency of the propulsion system.