Supplemental Instruments in a supercharged aircraft?

Ad: This forum contains affiliate links to products on Amazon and eBay. More information in Terms and rules

prabesh

Recruit
4
3
Jan 10, 2022
What are the most basic supplemental instruments that are installed in a supercharged aircraft? Boost pressure indication must be one I assume. Googled it but the most of the answers are in the context of cars so looking for some aviation related help. Some sources would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!!
 
Manifold pressure gauges (boost gauges) are fitted to all aircraft, supercharged and naturally aspirated.

None of the aircraft I am familiar with had any additional instrumentation. No oil pressure/temperature indicators that I can remember and those would be the only things that I can think of that might be worth monitoring.
 
As you climb you see your manifold preasure decrease and you activate the supercharger at a certain point to hold it so no need for an other instrument.
As you dive you have a to make sure to turn it off or decrease your throttle to keep the manifold in the limits.

The only one that comes to my mind are the turbine overspeed indicator in the P-47

1642999615394.png
 
Any aircraft with a controlable pitch propeller will have a manifold pressure gauge, called boost gauge on those with supercharging. With a fixed pitch propeller supercharged engines will have a boost gauge, unboosted (naturally aspirated) engines just rely on the RPM gauge.
 
In WW2 the typical US engine instrument set was tachometer, manifold pressure, coolant or cylinder head temperature, oil temperature, oil pressure, fuel pressure. The last three were often combined in an "engine gauge". The manifold pressure gauge indicated inches of mercury absolute pressure, so at sea level it showed about 30. In this P-40 cockpit these gauges are all together on the right side of the instrument panel.

P-40 cockpit

That would be a lot of instruments in a bomber, so dual-pointer instruments were used as in this B-24 (except that the two oil temperature gauges have one pointer and a switch to select left or right engine).

B-24 cockpit

Torquemeters and fuel flowmeters appeared in big airplanes after the war. In the B-36, the old practice of setting power with rpm and manifold pressure was only used for takeoff. After that, the flight engineer set power with rpm and torque. The fuel flowmeter was also important. Instead of simply setting the mixture levers to AUTO LEAN in cruise, the engineer set them to achieve the fuel flow specified in a chart. In this photo of the B-36 flight engineer station, the flowmeters are at the bottom of the right hand set of six columns. In the left hand set of six, oil temperatures are at top. I think all other instruments are obvious. Note the small vernier dials on the manifold pressure, torquemeters, and fuel flowmeters for precise reading.

B-36 cockpit
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back