Aircraft engines are tested throughout their life cycle for development, improvement or maintenance reasons. These tests are important and most of them are required by authorities. Therefore engine test facilities are operated by the industry to meet those needs. As the operation of engine test facilities requires high financial efforts facilities in academia are rare. Nevertheless some universities operate indoor test beds for a variety of jet engine types. During the past decades the performance of the engines, the thrust levels as well as the bypass ratios have raised. For this reason more and more larger engines have to be tested and the facilities have to cope with this challenge. At the University of the German Federal Armed Forces in Munich a jet engine test facility is used for scientific as well as educational purposes, which was built to operate fighter engine of the German Air Force in the late 1970s. Nevertheless, the capable thrust class was limited to 30kN which is far too low for resent jet engines. With the foundation of the center of competence "More Electric Engine" by the MTU Aero Engines GmbH one of the latest generation jet engines has been made available to be operated at the institutes test bed. The MexJET is based on the EJ200 engine powering the Eurofighter Typhoon. This power plant exceeds most parameters of the already operated engines by far pushing the facility and all of the subsystems to their limits. The publication addresses all the major challenges which came along with the installation of this engine into the existing test bed. The mechanical integration, test cell aerodynamics as well as safety issues will be discussed in order to give an idea of all the different disciplines working together to realize this project.    «

Aircraft engines are tested throughout their life cycle for development, improvement or maintenance reasons. These tests are important and most of them are required by authorities. Therefore engine test facilities are operated by the industry to meet those needs. As the operation of engine test facilities requires high financial efforts facilities in academia are rare. Nevertheless some universities operate indoor test beds for a variety of jet engine types. During the past d...    »