The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II is a family of single-seat, single-engine, all-weather stealth multirole fighters. Like other jet-powered aircraft, the thermal efficiency is not typically expressed through a direct formula as it would be for a heat engine. However, we can discuss relevant concepts and parameters.
The thermal efficiency is expressed mathematically as:
where:
- is the thermal efficiency,
- is the thrust produced by the engine,
- is the jet velocity,
- ṁf is the mass flow rate of fuel,
- is the specific enthalpy of the fuel.