Thanks. Yes, it is obvious from the modifications required that the 4,000 lb HC bomb wouldn't fit in any of the cells.
Cheers
Steve
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Thanks. Yes, it is obvious from the modifications required that the 4,000 lb HC bomb wouldn't fit in any of the cells.At best it is a 500lb MC bomb. Quite possibly it is a 250lb GP bomb. I have a side view, but it is horribly out of focus.
That's really amazing, I'm amazed nobody else connected the dotsStanford Moss ran his first gas turbine around 1914 and that was a turbo shaft engine designed to power an electrical generator. Like the first turboshaft engine ever built, by the French around 1896, it did not produce the power in practice that it did in theory. The French engine weighed some 600 tonnes. Another Frenchman designed and patented an axial flow jet engine that looked very like the early Jumo engines around ww1 but never built it. The concept was excellent apart from the hand crank starter.
When the US started into turbocharger design Moss was the man chosen to develop the technology as it was an offshoot of his gas turbine work. He soon developed a test rig that took the discharge from the compressor, ran it through a combustion section and into the turbine, in essence a jet engine in WW1.
Several people reputedly suggested this would make a great engine but his response was, in modern parlance, been there, done that, don't work. On the positive side, once he got the Whittle plans he was able to build a better engine than Whittles team in very short order as he had far more advanced compressors and turbines in production.
AwesomeI have an old wordperfect file with the full dates etc but no way to read it or I could name and date the French engine and give the dates of Moss's first engine.
ThanksA quick web search could not produce a program to open it but I shall keep trying.
Several people reputedly suggested this would make a great engine but his response was, in modern parlance, been there, done that, don't work. On the positive side, once he got the Whittle plans he was able to build a better engine than Whittles team in very short order as he had far more advanced compressors and turbines in production.
As for GE compressor technology, the aero engine firms of Wright, Pratt and Whitney and Allison used GE compressors for a while, but moved to making their own, leading to improved performance.
And which jet engine would that be? The early GE engines were based very heavily on Whittle's designs.
That's really amazing, I'm amazed nobody else connected the dots
Awesome
Thanks
As you are no doubt aware there are significant differences between the compressor on a turbocharger and the compressor of a piston engine supercharger.
The supercharger integral with any engine is optimized for a specific altitude (usually under 20,000 ft) and the specific engine it is incorporated in. It runs on the same oil as the rest of the engine and using the same oil pressure (usually under 100psi in cruise) as the rest of the engine. Likewise the temperatures of all components in an integrated supercharger are not massively different from the temperatures of the adjacent components. Additionally it is downstream of the carburetor so the air it is compressing is mixed with fuel droplets which change the relative density and airflow characteristics of the air it is processing. As a result the compressor integral with the engine requires compromises far different from those in the turbo-superchargers compressor.
Turbo-supercharger compressors on the other hand have their own oil systems operating at over 150psi as that is the pressure required by the wastegate regulator. The temperatures of the adjacent parts are far hotter and colder than the compressor itself, it processes fuel free air and is optimized in most cases for 25,000ft or above but not for any specific engine as the same turbo-supercharger must operate efficiently on any engine of the power range it is designed for - for example the same turbo can be used on R-1820, R-1830 and V-1710, all of which have different swept volumes and different operating rpms.
Centrifugal turbojet compressors operate in a very similar manner and under similar conditions to the turbo-supercharger - the main difference being the combustion chambers of the jet replace the piston engine as the source of high temperature air. In both cases the compressor provides the air for combustion and the turbine extracts the temperature to provide the power that drives the compressor. In the turbojet the aim is to have some residual temperature to provide thrust.
Likewise the turbines of the early turbojets were very similar to the turbines in the turbocharger and operated under the same conditions - both being driven by large volumes of high temperature gasses.
Sanford Moss had already spent 40 years working on gas turbine engines (he ran his first, 100% his own design, at Cornell University in 1902, not 1914 as I wrote from memory earlier) before he saw his first Whittle engine drawings and was far ahead of Whittle and co on understanding the aerodynamics, thermodynamics and metallurgy required for the early turbine engines. Don't forget his turbo-supercharger test rig was in reality a gas turbine engine and that he was using a single combustion chamber to provide the temperatures and gas flows for his turbines, rather than the multiple small cans used on turbojet, and was extracting the maximum possible heat from the gas flow in order to maximize the power driving the compressor..
Yes the early GE engines were very closely based on Whittles BUT the compressors and turbines were considerably enhanced by Moss's vastly greater knowledge of turbines operating in high temperature exhaust fumes and of compressors operating at all altitudes. It is also possible that he may have incorporated some of his combustion chamber technology or metallurgy though that is probably far less likely as he was only aiming at producing the required turbine inlet temperatures and mass air flow for testing the turbine whereas an operating engine must also ensure continuous combustion at all altitudes and power settings.
So this is why they were perceived as being overweight?The history of the gas turbine goes back to before WW I for industrial purposes. However, much like steam turbines, they weighed a lot closer to 10 pounds per hp than 1 pound per hp needed for aircraft engines.
From what I grasp, Westinghouse didn't really branch off it's steam and gas-turbine divisions, and steam turbine designers would often make periodic modifications and develop several different designs, each with different mods rather than more elaborate modifications.The Aircraft Engine Historical Society (enginehistory.org) has an article on Westinghouse's gas turbine development. Pretty much the poster child for making a hash of it.
That's real interesting...General Electric experiments continued until 1907, when fuel consumption was 4 lb. of kerosene per net hp/hr compared to good oil engines using 1 lb. of oil per net hp/hr. No way then seemed open to do better, and so the gas turbine part of the research was stopped. Moss continued at GE first on centrifugal compressors and the piston engine turbo-supercharger research and development program.
This sounds like something Edgar Buckingham proposed...Hugo Junkers, professor of mechanical engineering at Aachen Technical University (and soon to be of aircraft fame), together with Otto Mader, worked before the First World War on a free-piston engine, a system in which crank-less opposed pistons are used to produce exhaust gas to run a turbine.
Did this data make it across the pond?In England in 1926, A. A. Griffith wrote a report for the RAE proposing a new aerofoil theory of axial compressors. Griffith argued that the design of the blading of the compressor should be approached through aerofoil theory in order to get the maximum transfer of energy with minimal losses (the same as lift and drag, respectively). The converse of the same argument would be valid for turbines.
An appendix to that paper applied the new theory to the design of a hypothetical turboprop engine. During 1927 the Aeronautical Research Council authorised a small single-stage test rig which was built and tested under Griffith's supervision yielding stage efficiencies of better than 90 percent.
The efficiency was better and they were bigger right?As you are no doubt aware there are significant differences between the compressor on a turbocharger and the compressor of a piston engine supercharger.
I'm not so confident of this, I suppose you could argue that one advantage we had was that we had two years to sit back and watch what was happening.Has the U.S. gone to war in 1939, it wouldn't have struggled as much as one might think.
Why were officers not encouraged to use initiative? They're the ones who make the major decisions in combat...[/QUOTE]Glider said:A tendency to do things by the book and officers were not encouraged to do things on their own.
[/QUOTE]Why were officers not encouraged to use initiative? They're the ones who make the major decisions in combat...
Officers trained before the war had to do things by the book. This was pretty endemic in all the US pre war forces and carried on into the first years of combat. When these people were weeded out then the forces could really develop.
This ability in most cases of officers listening to more junior ranks was the reason he called it a citizens army.