Pratt & Whitney Canada JT15D
turbofan engine
The Pratt & Whitney Canada JT15D is a small turbofan engine built by Pratt & Whitney Canada. It was introduced in 1971 at 2,200 lbf (9,800 N) thrust, and has since undergone a series of upgrades to just over 3,000 lbf (13 kN) thrust in the latest versions. It is the primary powerplant for a wide variety of smaller jet aircraft, notably business jets.
Design and development
The JT15D was first run in 1967. Its use of a centrifugal compressor as the high-pressure stage in a turbofan engine was followed in 1970 by the Garrett TFE731. The fan for the original JT15D-1 was aerodynamically scaled to 75 lb/sec using the much larger Pratt & Whitney JT9D fan, first used on the Boeing 747.
About 70% of the air passing through the fan goes down the bypass duct. The JT15D-4 and later variants use a "booster" axial stage behind the fan which runs at the same speed as the fan and directs the remaining 30% of the air into the high-pressure compressor, after which it passes into a reverse-flow annular combustor. The hot gases flow through a high-pressure turbine that drives the centrifugal compressor, and a low-pressure turbine that drives the fan and booster.
The engine was first run in August 1967 before being test flown on an Avro Canada CF-100 Canuck in an underslung external test pod.
The public source identifies “Pratt & Whitney Canada JT15D” as turbofan engine. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Pratt, Whitney and Canada.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pratt & Whitney Canada JT15D” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.