Which country designed the best engines for WWII?

Which country designed the best aircraft engines for WWII?

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The book actually states what is included in the these weights;
"The installed engine required a charge air intake along with an exhaust system and engine isolator mounts. The engine accessories included items like oil and fuel pumps mounted on accessory drive pads provided at the engine rear face. Under engine controls weight of the throttle and mixture linkages form the cockpit were considered as well as the supercharger controls." The propeller and it's accessories, the starting system, the ADI system, the cooling system, the lubrication system and the fuel system are given as separate weights
 
Close, close, very close, but in the end there can be only one...and so I vote for England, birthplace of the merlin.

And the Napier Sabre. Why is there no in depth discussion of H-block engines on this forum? I would love to see a well-informed and data-backed debate.
 
Who designed the best engine? If this is measured (at least in part) by the succes of a specific engine in use, here is something to muddy the waters......

This September I had the privilege to meet a USAAF engine mechanic who served at Poddington and several other B17 bases in East Anglia throughout the war.

He told me that when doing an engine change they always dreaded seeing a replacement crate with "license built by STUDEBAKER" on the side, as they knew it would not be long before they had to pull it out again for another change. Some lasted only a few hours he reckoned.

This guy was adamant that the quality of these license-built Wright Cyclones was not a patch on the real thing, in fact you could see him getting really angry about it, even all this time after the war!!

OK this is hearsay, but I'm sure the old guy genuinely believed what he was saying.

So if it is true, then manufacturing quality could significantly impact on our perception of what constituted a good design, even though the design itself may not be at fault.

Food for thought............
 
You did produce the Nimonic alloys though, and without Nimonic jet development would have been much more difficult for the Brirish. (and therefore the US)
 
Nimonic 80 is a nickel/chromium alloy. (~80% nickel and ~19% chromium with small ammounts of others like titanium, zirconium, and aluminum iirc) It was used as the turbine alloy for British Jet engines in WWII. (I'm not sure if the same alloy was used in the US though)

But checking again, I was wrong about it being a Canadian invention (I'd been reading about it in an artical about Canadian nickel mining at Sudbury and Inco Alloys International Inc.)

Nimonic was of British origin.

Special Metals :: 100 Years of Innovation
 
Burmese Bandit said:
Napier Sabre. Why is there no in depth discussion of H-block engines on this forum? I would love to see a well-informed and data-backed debate.
Click to expand...
Napier have built some strange engines over the years.
I remember one was a "W" engine.
You can think of it as 3 inlines sharing a common crankshaft, or a "V" engine with an inline stuck in the middle of it, all sharing a common crankshaft.
Then there was an engine that had a triangular cross-section.
I think this was a Napier (either that or Atlas).
It was a 3 cylinder engine that had 2 pistons running in each cylinder and 3 crankshafts, each one located at each "point" of the triangle.
The pistons were of an "opposed" configuration, except, instead of looking away from each other, they looked at each other.
The combustion chambers were the center of each cylinder.
I believe both of these engines were Marine Diesels, though.
Interesting designs, nonetheless.

As for the point of this thread, I'd have to pick the USA.
I don't think any other country had as many successful designs, as those that we fielded during the conflict.




Elvis
 
The W-block engine was the Napier Lion from the 1920s ranging from the 450hp Lion I to the 1320hp Lion VIID and a couple of turbosupercharged and intercooled engines in between.

The other one is the Napier Deltic, an 18 cylinder two stroke diesel for marine use. It was also widely used for locomotives

Theres also the Napier Nomad, one of the most efficient piston engines ever, and also one of the most complicated. It was a flat-12 diesel with sleeve valves with turbocompounding and an afterburner.

The Sabre is probably the ultimate aircraft piston engine having unparalleled power for a relatively small size and weight.
 
Great point, Elvis.

Now since you quoted the USA for building strange engine designs, what about the "barrel engine"...eight opposed piston engines with a washplate at each end, driving a driveshaft in the middle!

I'll leave you experts to come up with the name of that one...and the reason for its disappearance from history (though one never knows, it might make a comeback one day. Opposed piston engines are getting a serious re-look in today's need for fuel efficient, low vibration, and quiet engines)
 
Burmese Bandit,

That sounds like the old Chrysler "Multi-Bank" engine that was used in the early Sherman tanks.
5 Chrysler 6's all plugged into a central transmission.

BTW, I actually mentioned England as the builder of strange engines, but you're right, we've built a few ourselves.



Elvis
 
Thanks for clarifying the names of those engines. It's been a while since I even thought about those. Kinda surprised myself that I even remembered them.
I'm not familiar with the Napier Sabre.
How late in the war are we talking with this engine, and how widespread was (is?) its usage?



Elvis
 
The Sabre was fairly widely used on the Hawker Typhoon and Hawker Tempest but failed to see any further use. It was first run in 1938 but didn't really become reliable until 1944. Napier was a small firm with old equipment that wasn't really up to the task of producing a complicated modern engine like the Sabre. The manufacturing quality was notoriously poor at first and this problem was compounded by poor maintenance (again because it was complicated). English Electric took over Napier in 1942 and had a bit of a clean out with an aim towards making the Sabre more reliable which they achieved by around 1944. Because Napier was a small company and all efforts were focused on making the Sabre reliable work on developed versions was very slow. A high altitude version with a 3-speed 2-stage supercharger was planned for high altitude fighters but discarded in EE's cleanup. There was never anything wrong with the design of the Sabre itself. It was compact and produced 2200-2400hp for the wartime versions. This was with low boost (+11lb and +13lb) on 100octane fuel.

In the late war/immediate postwar the Sabre was developed a bit further with the Mk VII as the last production version which found it's way onto the Hawker Fury. This produced 3500hp. The ultimate version only ran on the test bench and gave 5500hp at +45lb boost on 150PN (sleeve valves less prospensity for detonation). The same engine was run non stop for 175hours whilst giving 3750hp without failure. [This is from Setright and from historical Napier documents]
 
Despite loving the R-2600 R-2800, England gets my vote. RR and Bristol were really up to the task, with Napier suffering from stuff Red Admiral posted.
 
Here is 2 videos of the Messerschmitt Bf 109 flying. Man was it amazing! To hear that DB 605 engine roaring as it flew past! The ground literally shook as she went by. She did not land or anything, but would just make appearances. It was beautiful to watch her soar through the sky and do aerobatic maneuvers.

It was truly a dream come true for me to finally see a 109 fly.

The vids are short though. They may only play with Quicktime Player however.
 

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I havent read through all the thread ,just most of it , but the best piston engine in my eyes was the db603 that was meant to go in the fw190V18U1 .



Intercooled , twin turbo (looks like sequential??) also running mw50 .
Ive read rumours it made up to 4000hp .
With the right fuel its possible for very short periods of time .
It was scrapped before the first test flight .


In a way its kinda unfair to compare everyone like this when Germany was spending more resources on Jet fighter technology than the others . Would be a better if the date was up to Jan 1 1943 when all 3 were more even with piston engine technology
 
Anybody could draw up something on paper, it was getting it to work that was the trick.

followed by getting it to work for more than a few minutes

A Pratt Whitney engineer named Frank Walker is supposed to have gotten an R-2800 to touch 3800HP in a test cell using 150in. Hg of intake pressure and LOTS of ADI. The engine survived but getting such power levels out of production engines for even a few minutes on a regular basis might be another story.
 
I voted the US, we had the R-2800, the R-3350(once it's major teething problems were cured), the Packard built Merlins, the Allisons,(would have been a better motor had the Army not pulled it's teeth in early versions).These I see as the major standouts, many other aero-engines also.
Have to give credit to the British also, the original Merlin, and even Napier for their overly-engineered, overly-complicated contributions.(sleeve valved radials ???).
Also have to give credit to Junkers and BMW for their engines, wonder where they could have been had they our experience in metallurgy.............
 
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