Quote:
Originally Posted by A930Rocket
In addition to how they get the holes in the blades, I’m wondering how they get air to the blades. I can only imagine there’s a compressor inside the ship, air is pumped through the shaft and distributed to the blade, somehow…
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Bleed air was extracted from one of the stages of the gas turbine engines used for main propulsion (we had four LM2500 gas turbine engines - two in each main engine room). This pressurized air was cooled and then routed to the controllable reversible pitch propeller. This was 30 years ago though I imagine that similar methods are still employed by the Navy. Here is a quick read that talks about the systems but, unfortunately, does not explicitly address your questions -
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/systems/prairie.htm