Preliminary research on future smart engine architecture

Aero engines that fit the future have now increasingly attracted the attention of aerospace industry and academia. With this trend, many research projects have been carried out to explore future aero engine technologies. This paper focuses on engine design field, and aims to satisfy the future flight missions that may be unpredictably varying. However, the intrinsic strong coupling of engine component matching mechanism blocks acceleration of engine design. Under this condition, this paper comes up with the concept of smart engine architecture that via a series of engine decoupling strategies, the components can be decoupled to an extent that by properly selecting and assembling them, an engine that satisfies certain flight mission can be designed, this is named mission-oriented pluggable design mode in this paper. Following this idea, a multi-purpose engine design scheme is presented to demonstrate the potential of this engine design mode, and further value of smart engine architecture is discussed.