DU1's main goal is to get a working jet engine. It will be simple to manufacture a low-cost miniature jet engine to achieve these goals. Once this proof of concept is made, a more robust & complicated jet engine with much more thrust can be made, with items such as a turbine from a truck engine turbo and a higher bypass ratio.

The front half of the jet engine will be 3d printed from CAD models we create and then bolted to the metal back half with a layer of insulation in between. Although metal is much harder to work with than 3D printing, the temperatures reached in a combustion chamber can be incredibly hot and thus require heat resistant materials.

DU1 will have the main compressor blade that's powered by an electric motor which will compress the air. We're converting the high speed and air volume of the inlet to a slower, more compressed flow. We need a slower flow as fuel won't ignite when air is going too fast (think of blowing compressed air on a match), and we slow it down and straighten the flow via the stators.

We will have a single combustion chamber and no fans at the exhaust end. Think of it as replacing the entire crankshaft & multiple combustion chambers with 1 big chamber. The combustion chamber will be made out of sheet metal & the top of it will be a cone or a pyramid. A cone will be much harder to manufacture but will fill much of the void, whereas a pyramid will be fitting a square peg into a circular hole. A possible happy medium would be an 8-sided pyramid. Our machine shop specialist has been able to find a manufacturing process to mill out a hollow cone from a solid block of aluminum and thus may be another possible option.

We are currently working on the internals of the combustion engine, the fuel line & pump, and the spark.