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I think it would be different, Wayne, but they never made one and we'll never know for sure.
I think it would be different, Wayne, but they never made one and we'll never know for sure.
And we all know how miserably it failed - was slower and less maneuverable than standard 109. Fw 190 was a different beast as airframe was already used with heavy engine forward. But even the 190D was known to be not that agile as the 190A in certain aspects.The Me 209 II had an annular radiator
The extra weight forward could be compensated by ballast or by lengthening the rear fuselage.
And we all know how miserably it failed - was slower and less maneuverable than standard 109. Fw 190 was a different beast as airframe was already used with heavy engine forward. But even the 190D was known to be not that agile as the 190A in certain aspects.
Inverted engines were the very latest inthing around the time DB, Junkers and RR were putting the first proposals on paper for the wartime engines.
And we all know how miserably it failed - was slower and less maneuverable than standard 109. Fw 190 was a different beast as airframe was already used with heavy engine forward. But even the 190D was known to be not that agile as the 190A in certain aspects.
The origin of the inverted V-12 German Aero engines goes back to 1928 when a committee of aeronautical experts was assembled in Berlin at the bidding of the R.V.M. Representatives from the Army, the D.V.L. research centre, the Navy (airships were at their peak in 1928 ) and Deutsche Lufthansa were instructed to make an in-depth study of of the international scene regarding aero-engines and then produce specific guide lines for the future development of large air and liquid cooled motors.
Along with others, Prof. Wunibald Kamm, Ing. Wolfram Eisenlohr and Dr. Helmut Sachse (later heavily involved in the design of the B.M.W. 801) served on this panel. The specifications drawn up by this "think tank" were very detailed and incorporated some very advanced features including, for the liquid cooled engines:
1) 12-cylinder, inverted installation,
2) mono-block cylinder banks,
3) wet cylinder liners,
4) propeller reduction gear,
5) supercharger,
6) fuel injection,
7) high temperature glycol cooling,
8 ) provision of a cannon tunnel in the V.
Tender documents were sent to Daimler-Benz, Junkers and B.M.W. all of which eventually produced a V-12 engine model in response although none was able to incorporate all of the required features immediately.
Wolfram Eisenlohr was interviewed in 1980 regarding the 1928 requirement for inverted V-12s and he cited three reasons for the decision.
1) more compact installation.
2) better pilot view for single engine aircraft,
3) less exhaust flame dazzle during night flying.
This is confirmed in a Rolls Royce report titled "Comments on Visit to Germany, July 24th 1945 to August 12th 1945". In the report the RR engineers comment that:
"A good example of Air Ministry control lies in the inverted Daimler-Benz engine. The D.B. people said that both from a technical and production point of view they would have preferred to make an upright engine but they were compelled to make it inverted by the Air Ministry."
There were problems with the inverted V. The same report says that the DB engineers acknowledged this.
"It was very difficult to obtain consistent oil consumption and due to the rotation of the crankshaft, one bank gets more oil than the other. For this reason the engine is built with a lower compression ratio on one bank than the other."
Which may have answered another oft posed question.
Cheers
Steve
The DB605 had a master connecting rod from piston to crankshaft on one cylinder bank and a slave connecting rod attached to the master rod. It was like a radial engine in this regard. That's would indirectly lead to the different Compression Ratios as the slave rod is no longer connected at the crankshafts axis. Ive not run this through a excel simulation but its a given to me that radials had sligly higher CR on the master rod. Other explanations are that the airflow paths for left and right bank were different (which doesn't make sense as the manifold seems to be symmetrical) and that the CR was deliberately like this. It's possible to use a Y fork arrangement to attach to the crank shaft instead of a slave conrod.
That would be incorrect. The DBs had fork and blade rods.
http://www.ww2aircraft.net/forum/engines/inverted-engine-vs-engine-29473-10.html#post800873
Not according to this:
Daimler-Benz DB 601
The paragraph is headed DB605 construction.
"The pistons were forged light-alloy with concave heads and each piston had a floating wrist pin. There were three compression rings and two oil-scraper rings, with one below the piston pin. The master connecting rods utilized roller bearings, with three rings of 24 rollers each. The slave rod was keyed to the outside of roller race and had a lead-bronze bearing over the race."
Of course the article may be wrong and there were also different variants.
It says master and slave, but describes a fork and blade system.
This is what a master and slave rod configuration looks for a Vee engine