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Pratt & Whitney and the US Air Force successfully completed 2,168 cycles of endurance testing on the F-22’s F119 turbofan engine late last October, marking an important milestone for the F-22 program. The DAB criteria from the Department of Defense for initial service release of the Raptor’s engine was to complete one-half of 4,330 total accumulated cycle tests by December 2000. (A TAC measures the jet engine from one power setting to another and then back to the original setting.) An F119 engine built on the production line in Middletown, Connecticut, was subjected to simulated flight conditions in ground testing at the Pratt & Whitney facility in West Palm Beach, Florida, and then in two test sites at the Air Force Arnold Engineering Development Center, Arnold AFB, Tennessee.
The latest test, called an Accelerated Mission Test, evaluates engine durability by duplicating the types of missions pilots will fly in operational service. The engine was subjected to all required hot temperature time at full power, afterburner time, and throttle cycles that it will see in four-to-five years of operational service, including the full amount of time the engine will see in supercruise, or flying above 1.5 Mach without the afterburner lit. “The condition of the hardware after the test gives us great confidence that the F119 engine will meet its durability and reliability requirements for operational service,” said Tom Farmer, F119 program vice president at Pratt & Whitney. Testing is scheduled to be completed this year.
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