cherry blossom
Senior Airman
- 505
- Apr 23, 2007
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MichaelCorrect me if I'm wrong, but in the case of the BMW-engined Fw190 was the cooling fan not associated with a nose cowling oil cooler that consisted of lots of tubing. In such an implementation surely the fan's role is to direct a CONSTANT/CONSISTENT flow of cool air over the oil radiator regardless of aircraft's speed or attitude
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in the case of the BMW engined FW-190 was the cooling fan not associated with a nose cowling oil cooler that consisted of lots of tubing. In such an implementation surely the fan's role is to direct a CONSTANT/CONSISTENT flow of cool air over the oil radiator regardless of aircraft's speed or attitude.
MM
Some WW2 radial engines, such as the BMW 801, had a fan to "assist" in cooling. Do these actually suck in extra air in flight or do they simply speed up the flow of the same quantity of air through the engine? If the quantity of air is the same, how does the fan assist the cooling?
The answer to the second question is yes but really, any internal combustion engine will have some thermostatic means of controlling oil temperature; without it, it would be difficult to get the oil to it's optimal running temp and in the Soviet Union, practically impossible without baffling the front of the nacelle in the manner of the Polikarpov I-16.What was the oil operational/minimum/maximum tempreature?
Did the oil cooler have an thermostatic valve for the temp regulation?
What kind of oil (specification) did they use back then?
Actually, the fan was INSIDE then annular oil radiator, so it was only directing air over the cylinders themselves, not the radiator; it worked better when the airplane was moving, and the air was getting "sucked" through the sliding nose.
While looking at the very nice image posted by Stitch, I speculated that the performance would suffer as air was taken in after it had been used for cooling. It seems that Kurt Tank may have had the same idea as I found that the U7 variant of either the Fw 190A3 or A4 (internet sources differ) had external intakes (see pictures at The Focke Wulf FW-190, his aces,variants and victories. - Page 3 - WW2 in Color History Forum). Did the change work and if so why was it not used generally? If it did not work, why not?