Rodion Maksimenko and Vladislav Vladimirtsev, engineers at the "Gearbox" department of the Student Design Bureau (SKB) "DvizhOK" (with Vladislav being a recipient of the Samara Region Governor’s Medal), have successfully defended their bachelor's thesis. Their project focused on the design of a free turbine and gearbox for a small-scale turboprop engine.
The initiative was spearheaded by Ilya Leikovsky, Head of the "Gearbox" department and a faculty member of the Department of Design and Maintenance of Aircraft Engines.
Developing compact, fuel-efficient turboprop engines is often bottlenecked by the immense time and resources required to create and refine a new gas generator. To overcome this engineering challenge, Rodion and Vladislav proposed a highly efficient solution: designing a turboprop engine based on an already proven, existing gas generator, requiring the development of only the free turbine and the gearbox.
The foundation for their project was the "Kolibri" small-scale gas turbine engine, which was previously developed and rigorously tested right here at Samara University. This engine delivers a takeoff thrust of 220 Newtons.
During the development of the new engine, the "Gearbox" team employed a comprehensive suite of advanced engineering methods. These included thermogasdynamic calculations for the gas turbine engine, design calculations for the axial turbine, strength analysis of the turbine disk and blade airfoils, resonance diagram plotting for turbine blades, and durability assessments of gear meshes, shafts, splines, and bearings. They also calculated the precise oil flow requirements for the bearings and gearbox.
The newly designed engine has been designated as the MTVD-50. The team produced a complete set of engineering documentation, including assembly drawings for the free turbine and gearbox unit, technical specifications, a detailed technical description, working drawings of the free turbine rotor, and a step-by-step assembly procedure. They successfully completed the full design cycle of a planetary gearbox and developed comprehensive 3D models of the free turbine, the gearbox, and the fully assembled MTVD-50 engine.
By leveraging a proven gas generator, the MTVD-50 project significantly accelerates the development timeline for new power units. The MTVD-50 is designed to deliver 50 horsepower to the gearbox output shaft. This capacity is sufficient to lift aircraft weighing up to 500 kg equipped with a 1.5-meter diameter propeller, offering a substantial increase in thrust and a marked reduction in fuel consumption compared to the baseline gas turbine engine.
Rodion and Vladislav are not resting on their laurels: alongside their colleagues in the "Gearbox" department, they are already actively preparing for the prototype testing phase of the new engine.
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