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A turbofan harvests that wasted velocity and uses it to power a ducted fan that blows air in bypass channels around the rest of the turbine. This reduces the speed of the propelling jet while pushing more air, and thus more mass. The other penalty is that combustion is less efficient at lower speeds.
The bypass ratio (BPR) of a turbofan engine is the ratio between the mass flow rate of the bypass stream to the mass flow rate entering the core. [1] A 10:1 bypass ratio, for example, means that 10 kg of air passes through the bypass duct for every 1 kg of air passing through the core.
Turbofans are usually more efficient than turbojets at subsonic speeds, but at high speeds their large frontal area generates more drag. [21] Therefore, in supersonic flight, and in military and other aircraft where other considerations have a higher priority than fuel efficiency, fans tend to be smaller or absent.
Overall, a turbofan can be much more fuel efficient and quieter, and it turns out that the fan also allows greater net thrust to be available at slow speeds. Thus civil turbofans today have a low exhaust speed (low specific thrust – net thrust divided by airflow) to keep jet noise to a minimum and to improve fuel efficiency.
Therefore, turbines are more efficient for aircraft propulsion than might be indicated by a simplistic look at the table below. SFC varies with throttle setting, altitude, climate. For jet engines, air flight speed is an important factor too. Air flight speed counteracts the jet's exhaust speed.
A corollary of this is that, particularly in air breathing engines, it is more energy efficient to accelerate a large amount of air by a small amount, than it is to accelerate a small amount of air by a large amount, even though the thrust is the same. This is why turbofan engines are more efficient than simple jet engines at subsonic speeds.
This operation is a more efficient way to provide thrust than simply using the jet nozzle alone, and turbofans are more efficient than propellers in the transsonic range of aircraft speeds and can operate in the supersonic realm. A turbofan typically has extra turbine stages to turn the fan.
This has the advantage of being more efficient than allowing valuable compressed air to escape, although fuel consumption at low speeds is relatively unimportant. Further increases in pressure ratio, demanded by government procurement agencies and commercial airlines for long-range aircraft, caused a bigger mismatch of flow areas/density ...