Stealth jet team proves its metal

[中国万岁-ProsperThroughCo-]

From SCMP
Stealth jet team proves its metal

Stephen Chen
Jan 15, 2011

Metallurgist Shi Changxu won a top national science award yesterday for his contribution to the development of high-performance jet engines - three days after the first public test flight of the mainland's J-20 stealth fighter plane.

Professor Shi, former director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Metal Research in Shenyang , developed several families of top-secret, heat-resistant alloys, according to mainland scientists working on jet engines.

The secret alloys were developed decades ago, but because jet engine metals take a long time to test, Shi's alloys have only recently begun to be used in the mainland's jet engines.

In 1955, Shi left his teaching post at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and boarded a ship for the East. He was one of 30 or so Chinese scientists held by the United States government to prevent them from returning to communist China. Shi left the US about the same time as Qian Xuesen , a rocket scientist from the California Institute of Technology, who later founded the Chinese space programme.

After he landed in Shanghai, Shi was immediately sent to Shenyang, a heavy industry base in the northeast province of Liaoning , to boost steel production. Beijing's relationship with Moscow then soured rapidly and the Russians stopped helping their old ally develop fighter jets. The military turned to Shi for help.

With hard work, genius and luck, Shi not only came up with the required alloys using the traditional approach he learned in the West, but also devised something entirely new.

The laboratory performance of the new alloys was so good that no one dared to use them. For safety concerns, plane designers stuck with traditional alloys for China's mass-produced jet engines, whose performance lagged significantly behind their overseas counterparts.

Shi's alloys then began a long march for industrial acceptance. Only recently, with their application in some of the mainland's most advanced fighter jets such as the J-20, have designers fully accepted them.

Professor Zhang Lanting , from the school of materials science and engineering at Shanghai Jiaotong University, said the mainland's aviation material science sector had been waiting too long for this award.

Some people thought China did not have the materials to make high-performance jet engines, but they were wrong, Zhang said.

"The fact is, we have lots of top-quality materials, but to convince plane designers to use them we need to test it for decades - normally 30 years - for absolute safety," he said. "Within 10 years Chinese engines will begin to replace foreign ones in the civilian sector. In the military sector the replacement has already begun."

Professor Wu Suojun , a specialist in new materials at Beihang University, China's top aviation research institute, said the mainland was quickly narrowing the technological gap with the world's leading engine makers.

"With the successful test flight of the J-20 and other new planes, it is time to reward the heroes behind the scenes," Wu said.

Let's hope it's true