Jet engines work fundamentally by drawing in air, lots of air, mixing it with fuel and expelling the resulting gases out the back at great speed. That moves the engine forward by reaction, as well as the airplane attached to it.
But that’s not quite how today’s jet engines work. In fact, most of the thrust generated by a modern jet engine comes simply by moving an incredible volume of air, all at once, very quickly. A full 90% of the air that enters the engines passes right through without being mixed with fuel and ignited. The fan blades at the front are a slave to the core of the engine — and that core makes those fans do all the heavy lifting.
At the dawn of the jet engine, airplanes used a type of jet engine that’s no longer made for commercial uses: a turbojet, in which all of the air sucked into the engine passes through its core. These days, jets instead use turbofans, which push almost all of the air they ingest around the engine core. They’re quieter and far more efficient than turbojets.
The biggest jetliners in service today have extremely high-bypass engines, where there is a high ratio between the air accelerated through the engine — bypassing the core — and the air going into the core of the engine itself. The huge diameter of those engines, such as those on Boeing 777s, is due to the need to have a giant fan at the front.
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