Bf109E-3

[Viper2000]

Originally Posted by IvanK

"....by Americans, as a surrogate for reheat in the context of gas turbines"

LOL only the Poms call it reheat the rest of the world settled on Afterburner ... as did CLOD.

As a thermodynamicist, I can assure you that "the rest of the world" is wrong . They can't help it.

Actually misuse of afterburning is mostly an aviation/pop culture thing; in other applications people are more likely to just talk about a reheated cycle; of course, they're also less likely to talk about it in the first place...

In fairness to the Americans, people in the UK have been misusing the term for a long time as well; I've seen footage of the 1948 Farnborough airshow where the commentator talks about a Vampire "fitted with an 'after-burner' " in a perfect cut glass accent, such that you can actually distinctly hear both the quotation marks and the hyphen. Of course, all it was good for was improving the rate of climb, since the airframe very rapidly ran into its Mach limit on the level even dry... (another interesting distinction of course being that dry/wet power really refers to water injection, and the reheat equivalent would be cold/hot, but this distinction doesn't seem to survive on the engineering side now that water injection has gone out of fashion - IIRC the F-105's J-75 could actually use water injection and reheat either separately or in combination, so the distinction was once important).

The distinction between reheat and afterburning is an important one because true afterburning is generally a bad thing; reheat is generally deliberate. It's quite possible to have both going on in a gas turbine (eg hotshot/hotstreak reheat ignition is a actually a deliberate case of afterburning; the turbine wouldn't like it if it went on for any length of time, and I suspect even for the short durations actually seen in service it doesn't do the blades much good due to impingement of liquid fuel drops if nothing else); the decline of the piston engine and the massive improvements that the combustion people have made over the years have combined to pretty much kill off true afterburning in the aviation context, and therefore I suppose that the loss of its separate meaning from reheat is inevitable. But I digress...