Rolls-Royce Vulture
The Rolls-Royce Vulture is one of the last piston-powered aircraft engines to be built by Rolls-Royce . It was developed in the late 1930s to the 1940s. However, its development was not completed, which is why it mostly suffered from overheating and lubrication problems. So it never reached series production.
According to the Rolls-Royce tradition of the time, the name of the engine comes from the bird world, the vulture family .
history
Technically, it is related to the Peregrine , which is a liquid-cooled four-stroke V12 engine. Put simply, the Vulture consists of two such Peregrine engines, the cylinder bank angle of which has been widened to 90 ° and which work on a common crankshaft with six crankpins. Since the Vulture is a symmetrical X-engine with the same angles of 90 °, it is actually one of the in-line radial engines - six 4-stars in a row make 24 cylinders.
The crankshaft is cranked six times - once for each of the six four-cylinder stars. As with the in-line six-cylinder, the offset angles of the individual cranks are 0 °, 120 °, 240 °, 240 °, 120 °, 0 °. In this way, even ignition intervals are achieved (one ignition every 30 ° crankshaft rotation).
He was part of an arms program, engines with more power than the already established Merlin by Rolls-Royce to create (1100 hp or 820 kW in early production versions) - a program that also developments such as the Napier Saber brought forth.
During World War II it was planned to use the Vulture as a drive for British bombers (like the Avro Manchester ) and fighter planes (like the Hawker Tornado ).
However, with the rapid development of other simpler engines (e.g. the V12 Rolls-Royce Griffon ) or turboprop engines , the development of the promising Vulture was abandoned.
There are only a few examples of other symmetrical X24 motors (in-line radial motors with six 4-stars). These include the 2660 hp Daimler-Benz DB-604 and the 1500 hp Allison X-4520 with a displacement of 74 liters from 1928.
Technical specifications
- Engine type: water-cooled, supercharged 24-cylinder in-line four-stroke engine (6 × 4 stars)
- Stroke: 140 mm
- Bore: 127 mm
- Displacement: 42.56 liters
- Output: up to 1470 kW or 2000 PS
- specific power: 35 kW / l or 47 PS / l
Web links
- Image in the English language Wikipedia
- Avro Manchester recovered in France with RR Vulture ( Memento from May 19, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- internetmodeler.com
- luchtoorlog.be
