Rolls-Royce Kestrel
The Rolls-Royce Kestrel was a water-cooled twelve-cylinder - V - aircraft engine in a standing arrangement ( crankshaft below) of the British manufacturer Rolls-Royce . The Kestrel was the first Rolls-Royce engine to have a crankcase ( engine block ) made of an aluminum alloy instead of gray cast iron .
According to the Rolls-Royce tradition of the time, the name of the engine comes from the bird world, the genus of the falcon (English: kestrel ).
history
After the appearance of the Curtiss D-12 presented in 1923 , Rolls-Royce had to react and also offer an engine built according to modern aspects. Napier's chief engineer , Arthur Rowledge , was poached and tasked with developing a competitive engine, initially significantly improving the Rolls-Royce Condor .
Building on this experience, Rowledge developed an engine with a supercharger in order to have full power available even at great heights and to be able to increase this later simply by increasing the boost pressure. In addition, there was hot cooling (design temperature: 150 ° C) with a closed and pressurized cooling system.
After development began in 1925, the first engines could be delivered in 1927. They initially had an output of 462 hp, but this could soon be increased to 530 hp with the Kestrel IB. This version was used in the two-seater light bomber Hawker Hart . In 1933, the Rolls-Royce Goshawk equipped with evaporative cooling (evaporative cooling ) was derived from the Kestrel IV .
The development progressed rapidly, so that the Mk V already delivered 708 hp at a speed of 3000 min −1 . The Kestrel XVI used in the Miles Master advanced training aircraft already had 762 hp. The Rolls-Royce engine was also exported abroad. Among other things, German aircraft construction companies bought some Kestrel engines, which were built into the prototypes of the Arado Ar 67 , Arado Ar 80 , Heinkel He 170 , but above all in 1935 in the two competitors Heinkel He 112 and Messerschmitt Bf 109 , because in this one Performance class German aircraft engines were still in development.
Thanks to improvements in fuel and the higher compression ratio possible , the Kestrel XXX already produced 1060 hp by 1940. However, it was soon replaced by the much more successful Rolls-Royce Merlin . As a further development, the Peregrine V12 engine was developed in 1938 and - with extensive use of Kestrel components - the Vulture X engine with 24 cylinders as early as 1937 , both of which, however, were no longer of great importance. A total of around 4750 Rolls-Royce Kestrel were built in over 20 different versions.
Applications
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Technical data (Kestrel V)
- Bore: 127 mm
- Stroke: 140 mm
- Displacement: 21.24 l
- Compressor: centrifugal fan, with gear ratio 1: 8.81
- Full pressure altitude: 4260 m
- Power: 512 kW (695 PS)
