Material sciences needed for modern jet engine blades are a closely guarded secret, and thanks to not manufacturing them in china, those secrets have managed to remain not stolen.
Can Chinese companies order just the blades from RR or P&W?
I've watched their manufacturing video recently and shocked how much of it was hand labour - it's not something I'd associate with precision. My partner said they must know better tho lol.
[−]kevin_thibedeau · 2026-07-01 Wed 23:14 UTC ·
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The RR video showing manual assembly of wax molds is a low volume development line. It isn't their main production process.
But those companies have no commercial interest in supporting a Chinese manufacturer that just wants the blades even without export controls, when they can make much higher margins selling whole engines that must be maintained using their parts (in practice variants of the engines destined for COMAC also omit some of the IP that finds its way onto Airbus and Boeing because you can help a customer too much...)
> DD6 is a second-generation nickel-based single-crystal superalloy developed by the institute with fully independent intellectual property. Its chief engineer, Li Jiarong, said the alloy’s performance matches or exceeds that of comparable second-generation superalloys used in Europe and the United States, at a lower production cost.
US manufacturers have already developed sixth-generation SC superalloys and most Western airlines are on engines with third- and fourth-generation materials.
The technology behind single crystal superalloys is relatively well understood, the problem is getting the process reliable enough to be economical in an industry that requires tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars to develop through trial and error. The TFA's point is that unlike EVs or semiconductors, the turbofan industry is between a rock and a hard place that China's other successful industries weren't.
[−]IHateAcronyms · 2026-07-02 Thu 05:33 UTC ·
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Isn't China currently among the leaders of material science with lots of top 10 universities located in China? [0] (in rankings that do not incorporate prestige but actual scientific output)
All I know is that they produce a lot of engineers, while the US produces a lot gender studies majors. I rarely say it, but I do not foresee much that they won't be leaving us sharply behind on soon, other than poverty and homelessness, which we have pretty well covered.
There are about as many gender study majors in the U.S. per year as there are aviation engineering majors. That is one small niche of engineering majors that includes all of gender study.
I guess I can relax and stop worrying that we're falling behind a bit. But I do wonder what the numbers really are, and just how many engineers we produce compared to China, of course, without qualifying everyone that learned Visual Basic as an engineer, unless, of course, that's where they're actually getting their own numbers from.
its difficult to see from the lens of software and information technology, and open source academia, but physical science is often discovered via experimentation and cant just be brute forced. usually it disseminates as it is adopted into industrial process and is then copied. a lot of scientific discoveries are made due to impulsive-creative intuition
for example:
- until the end of ww1 the haber bosch process was confined to germany
You fell for a meme that was tired years ago already (your link is from 2017, after all). The article itself notes, “Relatively low-value items, like ballpoint pens, have not been a priority”, so obviously this says little about higher-priority military and industrial areas to which the CCP devotes greater effort.
It is not the pen, it is the pen tip. Ballpoint pen tips are microscopic tungsten carbide ball held inside ultra-thin steel sockets. So you need cutting tolerances precise to 0.001 millimeters. If the socket is a fraction of a micron too loose, the ink leaks. Too tight, and the pen won't write.
The ballpoint pen was invented in 1938. It doesn't rely on any arcane manufacturing technology.
[−]NitpickLawyer · 2026-07-02 Thu 02:03 UTC ·
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It's not even that. You can have all the designs you need, but you also need a bunch of downstream tech to get from drawings to production. This is something that centrally planned economies struggle with. You can't 5-year-plan your way to jet-engines if you haven't previously 5-year-planned for all the auxiliary infrastructure needed to support that.
We already know this was an issue with the soviets, back when they had the plans for us jet engines (for fighter planes), but couldn't replicate them. Same for stealth, hell even some of their rocketry. And the soviets had plenty of auxiliary systems already in place, during the cold war. As someone said above, they could do quantity, they could do limited high-quality, but couldn't do both at the same time.
There are things that work with 5-year plans: railroads, road infra, buildings, etc. And there are things that are not that easy, and take multiple decades from when the order comes to having it realised. Something that's not immediately obvious for western folks is that when you mix central planning with authoritarian governments, you will get a huge number of pain points along the way, where orders come downwards towards the ones executing them, and overreporting/missrepresentations/lies go upwards. It's like the longest game of telephone, where you start from the top, demanding x y z, get reports that you're on your way of getting 3x, 3y, 3z and in reality you have some of x, none of y, and z looks like z but it's actually three x's in a trench coat.
Fun story: it is not just jet engines - it is only recently that china was able to actually make indigenous ballpoint pens https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38566114
I've watched their manufacturing video recently and shocked how much of it was hand labour - it's not something I'd associate with precision. My partner said they must know better tho lol.
But those companies have no commercial interest in supporting a Chinese manufacturer that just wants the blades even without export controls, when they can make much higher margins selling whole engines that must be maintained using their parts (in practice variants of the engines destined for COMAC also omit some of the IP that finds its way onto Airbus and Boeing because you can help a customer too much...)
> DD6 is a second-generation nickel-based single-crystal superalloy developed by the institute with fully independent intellectual property. Its chief engineer, Li Jiarong, said the alloy’s performance matches or exceeds that of comparable second-generation superalloys used in Europe and the United States, at a lower production cost.
US manufacturers have already developed sixth-generation SC superalloys and most Western airlines are on engines with third- and fourth-generation materials.
The technology behind single crystal superalloys is relatively well understood, the problem is getting the process reliable enough to be economical in an industry that requires tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars to develop through trial and error. The TFA's point is that unlike EVs or semiconductors, the turbofan industry is between a rock and a hard place that China's other successful industries weren't.
[0] https://scholars-stage.org/china-and-the-future-of-science/
for example: - until the end of ww1 the haber bosch process was confined to germany
- jet engine turbine blades today
- most historically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire , medieval napalm that nobody has been able to replicate even now
its a clear prioritzation choice from the government, and that prioritization is itself a technology
notably this same prioritization mode resulted in the soviet union failing to produce quality of life improvements for its citizens.
the failure is that the CCP is unable to prioritize making simple useful stuff
Source from al-Arabiya: https://english.alarabiya.net/variety/2017/01/14/At-last-Chi...
The point (no pun intended) is that China was beginning to crack the processes for making the precision machine tools that make machine tools.
We already know this was an issue with the soviets, back when they had the plans for us jet engines (for fighter planes), but couldn't replicate them. Same for stealth, hell even some of their rocketry. And the soviets had plenty of auxiliary systems already in place, during the cold war. As someone said above, they could do quantity, they could do limited high-quality, but couldn't do both at the same time.
There are things that work with 5-year plans: railroads, road infra, buildings, etc. And there are things that are not that easy, and take multiple decades from when the order comes to having it realised. Something that's not immediately obvious for western folks is that when you mix central planning with authoritarian governments, you will get a huge number of pain points along the way, where orders come downwards towards the ones executing them, and overreporting/missrepresentations/lies go upwards. It's like the longest game of telephone, where you start from the top, demanding x y z, get reports that you're on your way of getting 3x, 3y, 3z and in reality you have some of x, none of y, and z looks like z but it's actually three x's in a trench coat.