Homemade Axial Jet Engine 

Just the fact that you are using your brains, experimenting, and being productive, instead of sitting on your ass playing video games all day and/or doing drugs, deserves a big thumbs up!

Hearing comments about how this is not a real jet engine - that there's no air compression and that it's not self-sustaining - just makes me laugh. It's a high school project, not GE or Pratt & Whitney research and development. It's a step that the vast majority of high school kids will never make. So what if it isn't self-sustaining? If you saw an airplane that could only stay aloft for a few seconds, you'd probably say it's not a real airplane but guess what... in Kittyhawk, NC, there were 2 men (Orville and Wilbur Wright) who owned a bicycle shop and they would beg to differ. On December 17th, 1903, the Wright Flyer flew for 12 seconds, proving that powered flight was possible. It was nothing compared to the aircraft of today but it was a very important first step. This young man has simply taken that important first step. He had the desire to learn more and he experimented. Don't make fun of someone just because it doesn't fit with your idea of a jet engine. By the way, how do you know that there is no compression? It may not be efficient, but simply shortening the blade length of each compressor stage would achieve compression. I look forward to the day that this young man has access to a CAD program and a machine shop because it will be nice to watch people eat their words. From an aviation enthusiast, Aircraft Mechanic and USAF Avionics Systems Specialist (F-15, F-16 and F-111), I say WELL DONE and keep up the good work!

Jesus people, it was a "high school" science project. Just where the hell are they suppose to get precision made parts and bearings made of really expensive alloy metals? For a couple of kids using tin cans, home made fan blades, and an air-compressor to simulate the compression cycle I think they deserve an A. Nicely done guys.

The short life due to high temperature shows how sucessful this project was, because it was able to generate so much power and heat that the inner engine melted. Good job, i liked it!

we all love a good backyard jet, nice work indeed

You did really well, son! Very few professionals have built a successful axial flow turbine at this scale. You had only standard materials and no CNC support, so your result is incredible! The fuel actually ignites internally (this is often a problem for axial flow turbines - the fuel tends to blow out the back and ignite like an afterburner only), the turbine accelerates... you've got the makings of a successful turbine! I also do home engineering and I've never come close to anything as impressive as this. Well done!

Thank you. You're totally right, the compression section was the part that made this engine not completely self sustaining. The engine had only a 3-stage compressor and I did not care for stator vanes in the compression area, wich was a mistake. Something else that was missing was a smooth way to guide the air to the next compressor wich meant that the air flow got distroyed.

You guys will make your way ! Congrats from an old buff (Dr. rer.nat.Volker Klein - project manager in the German space industry).I say this, because I also started in early days with technical experiments (transmitting radio programs from the house into the garden - some 100 ft) by a torch lamp that was connected to the second loundspeaker outlet of our AM tube receiver. In the garden the light of the torch lamp was focussed by a small lens onto the light sensitive side of a Germanium transistor. Its output was strong enough to drive a hig impedance (2 MOhm) headphone to listen to the radio programs in the garden (even at bright daylight)... that was in 1965, when I was 13.So ... go on and never hesitate when problems are occurring; it's just normal and there is always a way to cope with them and to solve the problem.

As a Physics and Chemistry Teacher, I am impressed with the work those lads did. It's just high school so it is good enough..👍✌️

I can't believe all the hate this video gets in the comments. SO many know-it-alls. Even if the engine never got self-sustaining it was still a cool experiment for some teenagers to pull off. If I were going to criticize, it would be to say you need better safety precautions. Hot metal parts spinning at high speed do very bad things to skin when they come apart. You need more than goggles; you need a physical shield and a way to operate it without standing right next to it. But this is very cool.

Ignore the doubters please - what a talented and creative student you are for trying this! Absolutely fantastic efforts and for sure you're going places. Best of luck

At last! Someone who knows the difference between an axial fan and a jet, lol. Nice design, looks like it was fun.

Like others I question whether or not we are seeing a jet turbine or just a noisy blowtorch. I do however applaud the young men in this video for their determination and curiosity. Science and engineering doesn't come without the occasional setback. Keep up the good work men!

Great piece of work. Just to get it balanced at those speeds is impressive. Ignore the idiots with the stupid comments who could not even fix a puncture on a bicycle. They are the failures - you are a winner.

I wish my big brother was alive to see this. He was always testing the limits of engineering. Great video!

Everyone needs to calm down about this school students project. Okay, to those of us in the know, this isn't a jet engine/gas turbine. But to these young students, it's a project made from raw materials and fashioned into something that looks and sounds like a gas turbine, even though it doesn't give any thrust. It's a scavenger engine that takes in energy and gives nothing back. A bit like our UK government really, but lets not go there. So, to these students/kids, it has fire, it has heat, it's loud, it's dangerous and most of all, they made it. It doesn't matter if it won't run on its own. This isn't some school for Sir Frank Whittle Aeronautical Research. It's a high school. Let them bask in glory. Let them have their fun. That is what school is all about. Learning. They know that this won't push a 747 down a runway. Just as they would also know that building a vehicle out of LEGO won't allow them to drive on main roads. The prize here is their excitement and learning. So at least give them a break. When you painted pictures in your infant schools, did you have everyone telling you you'd never be a Monet or Vincent van Gogh? No. You were learning a lesson in creativity. Just as these youngsters are. Agreed?

This is really cool. Congrats!

How are the bearings mounted for the bearing for the main shaft...?

Well done guys. Creating the rotors alone and getting them to spin fairly smoothly was incredible really. Kudos!

Looks like the compressor wasn't doing much, but considering they don't teach you anything about fluid dynamics at that level, I'd call it an excellent effort

BRAVO, folks! I tried myself a similar one, 30 + yeras ago, also made with tin metal, but I never reached testing! congratulations from Romania!

You made a nice compressed air spinny thingy with some propane for show, very nice.

First of all props to you for making this, secondly, PLEASE LEARN HOW TO USE YOUR AND YOU'RE CORRECTLY! Thank you.

For being HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS you guys have done VERY well with this. I am sure that with some more research and refining that you could very well get it working. And remember guys they are just HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS!!! No need to beat them down for failure!! that is how some of the greatest minds have come about!!

I am sorry about your project having broken, it looked so good.I am probably too late to comment xD it looked sick

Now you know why the ME-262 engines only lasted 12 - 20 hours.

VERY COOL. You absolutely positively must make a build series on this.

This is much better than many of the so called "home made jet engines" which were only just an electric motor + fan + fuel. Even though not successful, it was a great attempt at a real jet engine. Well done guys.

Just a heads up guys. For those of you who think your so cool saying that this thing sucks! I would like to see some of you build a jet engine out of scrap! Not a turbo that is not home made.... Well you should all keep your meaning less comments to your self know cares what you have to say. If you would like to put in a comment make it informational and not informative. It was at least worth a try. If I would say for my self that is a pretty good first timer jet engine!

Why is the world so fucken negative now?! Leave the dude alone, it was a high school science project for fucks sake! I think its pretty badass even if its not self sustaining

Good job buddy, best high school science project I've ever seen. Regardless that it relies on the compressed air to sustain power I think its still a solid effort

That was a lot of effort and a great job!

first the beer can hobo stoves - now campbell's soup can jet engines !

I've been fantasizing about making a homemade turbojet for years. I wanna eventually break the speed record for fastest rc plane. I wanna make a RU-vid channel showing their construction and tests. This is my dream :D

That looks very interesting! I bet you had fun making it and learned a lot.

Great project you are on the right track. It's fun learning about engines through testing of different methods and theories. Well done keep it up!

Testes muito bons amigo!!!

Keep it up! If you do not test, how are you supposed to know....

this is an awesome science project man. Great work.

Bloody good effort for a school project, well done

Um, looks like it's only "running" on the compressed air.

can you cook my steak in 2.3 seconds? well done please!

Woooooooooah! I loved it my friend! Congratulations! I was thinking about build other kind of engine like the ones used in small aicrafts :D

This is pretty cool! You can see the can expand in the last segment. I think adding the large fan blades in the front, like with most jet engines, will allow the device to cool down. Seeing as only 10% of an engine's thrust comes from the heated gases, the addition of a larger, main fan blade would give you the remaining 90% of thrust, provided that you have the right gear ratios.

Excellent experiments and very well done. A great effort. Bill

Future Gas Turbine Mechanic or GSM! Great job guys. The world for GSMs are very rewarding I was a gas turbine mechanic in the Navy. There are many types of gas or steam turbines land, sea and air based. Learn and good luck

That is a cool project you guys made. Now you need to attach it to something and make it fly. Good Luck

Great job! Lots of advice from most of which have never done this before. Good luck in your studies and congrats on a great project!

This is awesome! Thank you for your work :)

This is pretty cool! Got any photos of construction? And did you ever build another one?

This is absolutely awesome work guys, really well done indeed. I wish you good luck in building a stable engine and look forward to seeing your progress. Bravo.

I'm happy to see young folks willing to experimenting, be careful and I hope you figured out the problem too.

This is awesome! How old are you? Because I am 14 and am planning to build a jet engine like this for my engineering project.

Reading the remarks made about your home made Can fuel turbine engine. Great job, Love it. One of the greatest rocket engineers to come out of the USA was the son of a coal miner, even his father for the longest time gave him a lot of grief, it was his school teacher & mother who supported him in his early beginning years as a youth, Great work kid> by the way, It's but heads like these snarks who will end up eating dirt when your making good,. keep it up, But above all be careful, This stuff can fly apart, It will get you if you don't keep that in mind. I'm a retired caterpillar Mechanic, I was messing around with engines & all when just a kid. everyone thought I was a wasting my time; It wasn't. My early years I used to drag race, I would use anything I had on hand, I never paid no mind to what it looked like, fast was all I cared about, Before the movie came out with two guys running a big block in a 55 chey, I had already done it, everyone who was anyone in there mind said I couldn't do it, Made fun of me, after that I had people rolling in my yard wanting me to work on there cars. crazy isn't it.

The engine has a string that even the engine itself has not flew away. Bravo.

Awesome video. Awesome project. Congrats guys! Wish I had tried this in my science fair project. I launched model rockets for mine and measured the height with different fin designs.

An 'Engine' would have produced it's own thrust from the fuel. You're just burning the fuel while spinning it with compressed air.

Why is this clever young man sitting so close and exactly on the axis of a jet engine that is being tested?

Guys can u tell how did you do the axle? Did you use bearings? And if u did, how did u attach the bearing to the casing?

It also totally sounds like a real jet engine. Good job my dude

so was it able to ever self run? looked like you just used compressed air to spin it, which doesnt make it a jet, but makes it a couple of fans you're spinning with some fire between them. If it can't power itself, it sn't an engine.

Well done guys. great achievement. Tin cans never were so advanced. Titanium next time huh? Your critics here don't get that to do that with mere tin cans is some achievement and it was bound to melt given the heat that jets operate at. I suspect the critics never get off their fat As and just like pulling the wings off flies.

Excellent!! These guys just made possible what I wanted to build in my childhood.. That is the beginning of human progress: experimentation. Hope some day I will do the same but meanwhile I had to go to the job..

so you guys made a jet engine with soup cans for a high school project. you deserve a huge like. the most challenging project high school assigned me was measuring a fuckin' tree by his shadow. go ahead guys!

Just a hunch. A smaller diameter exhaust with provide some back pressure which might sound counter initiative but helps keep the system more fuel rich increasing fuel efficiency (More Oxygen) and making the system stay pressurised at the intake thus a more reliable internal environment.

Wait, they're pumping in compressed air through it and then igniting the jet fuel by having a blow-torch at the end? Doesn't seem right..

Excellent job you guys. I built turbine engines of all types at work for 37years so I understand how difficult it is to get one going. Be safe and don't get too close to these while you are testing them.

The level of how stupidly dangerous this was,.... AMAZING! Love everthing about this, hope you blokes graduated in to the aerospace industry, more folks willing to have a go and experiment are what the world needs.

God dag! There is a high school (10th grade) part of physics curriculum called thermodynamics. It's taught in almost any country except the US. I am pretty sure it's studied in Sweden. The last half is engines 101 from a thermodynamic perspective (Carnot cycle, eficiency, etc). There are books everywhere (including free ebooks) and they contain both theory and problems. To study just the thermo chapter by yourself (and solve 100-200 problems so the concepts sink in) you need about 4-6 weeks. Then you have the background and you are up to the races. It won't go particularly into jet engine design (that's way more complicated) but it will make you understand why doing the things you do here (with tolerances and materials you are using) has no higher chances of success than trying to build a perpetual motion system. I am pro experimentation and I don't mean to rain on your parade but here the trial and error approach will not take you to your goal of producing a working jet engine. You could put one together though using a car engine turbo (cheap from a junk yard) and that would be challenging enough by itself. You would learn a lot and have a first working jet in a short time. Then you can pursue machining some parts or buying rotary parts from Aliexpress and making the rest yourself. Think about this, the piston engine (in various forms) is a few centuries old while the jet engine is only several decades old. The turbines existed for thousands of years (ancient Greeks, China, etc) and the principles of using turbines to compress a fluid and extract mechanical energy from a fluid were known for centuries. The theory of thermal engines again, was developed more than a centuty ago by hard core mathematicians and physicists who could put most of the MIT aerospace graduates to shame if they could raise up from their tombs today. Yet the first sucessful jets were produced only in the 30's because the technology (materials and precision) was not advanced enough before that time. 100-150 years ago they were not using tin cans cut with scissiors to produce regular piston engines because they knew the engines wouldn't work. You need compression (several athmospheres) to be able to run a piston engine and the same is true for a jet. In a piston engine is sufficient to have strength and precision to do that (you don't need refractory materials since you have cooling and you don;t need very light materials since the speeds of part movements are low). A jet is a 4-stroke engine except that the time separation of the 4 cycles is not necessary since you have spatial separation. Because you do the everything inertially (dynamically slapping the gas molecules to try to force them closer to each other) you need blade speeds close to the mean speed of the molecules in the gas at the working temperature of the gas. This is about the speed of sound in the gas, 300-400m/s, which means 150,000-200,000 rpm for a 3-4 inch diameter rotor!!! A couple of grams misbalance will result in tens of kilograms parasitic forces in the bearing (explosion of your system) and if you don;t see that it means you are spinning way too slow to obtain any meaningful compression in the chamber. One way to tell is installing a small manometer connected with a very skinny but long tube to your combustion chamber (to protect the manometer from heat and also to prevent the volumetric loading of your combustion chamber). Just measure the pressure you get in the chamber during the experiment. If it's below , I don't now, let's say 0.2-0.5 atm, that's not enough to get any meaningful self sustained operation. Also, since your blades are not even close to an ideal aerodynamical shape, you might need much more than that to realistically get any efficiency, hence self-sustained operation. Keep in mind that any of these inertial forces are proportional to the square of the rpm, so if your rpm is 20k that means only 1% pressure of the case in which you have an rpm of 200k. Another thing to think about is simply the strenght of the enclosure (tincan) - one single atmosphere on 10cm long 10 cm diameter cilinder will produce 300kg of total force. Your tin can will simply give in well before that. Same applies for your turbine blades, a 1cm square blade will need to stand at least 1kg perpendicular force without changing shape significantly, and that is at high temperature which is not possible when you use thin metal sheet from a tin can. These are just a few preliminary points mentioned here, I didn't get into gasodynamics or combustion chamber design. That's more complicated but there you can do a lot of productive trial and error work once you get proper compression. Take a Volvo turboi unit for cars and weigh it. It must be at least 10-20kg. These are 10-20 kg's of high tech materials processed with high precision. That turbo will produce a very LOW efficiency jet engine, just a barely working one because the compression pressure is too low. You are trying to do the same wiith 500 grams of tin can material cut with household scissiors. Good luck! I apologize for being too preachy.

You built it, so I guess you had an idea of the potential risks, but I'd always leave a wider safety margin: I would not stay that close, and even less on the longitudinal axis.

This is pretty cool! You can see the can expand in the last segment. I think adding the large fan blades in the front, like with most jet engines, will allow the device to cool down. Seeing as only 10% of an engine's thrust comes from the heated gases, the addition of a larger, main fan blade would give you the remaining 90% of thrust, provided that you have the right gear ratios. Otherwise, this is pretty amazing for a high school project.

This is impressive as hell! Nicely done!

Only one thing to say: Startup approved, call Apron 121.75 for push. Looks realy realy good for a High school project. How many hours u need to build this? Its pretty cool :D

Still need compressed air to get its spin, without it just seems like a fancy torch. However, nice experiment. It probably not producing enaugh compression to get its own spin.

I think this is fantastic, yes it had faults and may have not fully worked but they gave it a go. I hope they got full marks at school with their project and continued with it after. So many young people today would be happy spending their time wasting it away. Shame on anyone who disliked this video.

Great job guys. I'm a retired airline mechanic who enjoyed working on the real ones. I'm impressed.

I guess that's why they make jet engine parts out of titanium

A jet engine with cans and bolts ... You are very optimistic guys.

Remarkable and terrific!! That's ingenuity! Hats off to you!!

Would you list the specific lessons learned during this experiment. I.e. materials of construction, bearing types, fuel types, ignition methods, maximum speed?

ignition first! BEFORE fuel!!!!

Cool.

hey was wondering if you could point me in the right direction for the plans so that I may build for a school project as well please and thank you very neat

My hero Frank would be proud of you guys keep up the experimenting...you msy stumble onto something no one else has..plus its fun....well done chaps...

Better use of time than playing games !

from what I can see it did not operate under it's own power.....did not accelerate and there was no thrust control.....therefore this was not a jet engine at all just some tin cans with blades at the front and rear driven by compressed air and some fuel for show only

Can you explain the startup process of the engine? Do you have motors or such that spin the turbines?

Hi you know for the petrol feed, when the turbine starts to spin was it the air pulling the fuel in? How did the fuel pull in with the air at the start?

Or just buy a referencedesign R9 290/x

good start guys, for your next project check this guy (www rcdon com) he make turbines in his garage too

im planning to build a jet engine myself, any ideas on how to get or make the turbines? how did you do it?

What did the compressor stage of the engine comprise of? you could have got that to work without the compressor. nice stuff!

its not self sustaining

Obviously they he/she didn't go into english:"Your about to witness..."

Try extending the shaft to bearings out in front of the engine, and mount the housing seperately from the compressor. That would solve the melting bearings issue. The next problem you would likely experience is keeping the flame at higher speeds. After that, it would be cooling.

Any planning and parts needed for this awesome jet engine?

high school project? in US the high schools are giving very good edcucation then.

That heap of junk wouldn't even pull the skin off a rice-pudding!

it was fun to watch,great job,from the beginning of the video i knew your bearings will fail because i didn't saw any lubrication or/and cooling method

Great Guys. That's very wonderfull work. Congratulations to all from Brazil