The Rolls-Royce Merlin is a British liquid-cooled V-12 piston aero engine of 27-litres capacity. Rolls-Royce designed the engine and first ran it in 1933 as a private venture. Initially known as the PV-12, it was later called Merlin following the company convention of naming its four-stroke piston aero engines after birds of prey.
The sleeve valve is a type of valve mechanism for piston engines, distinct from the usual poppet valve. Sleeve valve engines saw use in a number of pre-World War II luxury cars and in the United States in the Willys-Knight car and light truck. They subsequently fell from use due to advances in poppet-valve technology, including sodium cooling, and the Knight system double sleeve engine's tendency to burn a lot of lubricating oil or to seize due to lack of it. The Scottish Argyll company used its own, much simpler and more efficient, single sleeve system (Burt-McCollum) in its cars, a system which, after extensive development, saw substantial use in British aircraft engines of the 1940s, such as the Napier Sabre, Bristol Hercules, Centaurus, and the promising but never mass-produced Rolls-Royce Crecy, only to be supplanted by the jet engines.
The Napier Sabre is a British H-24-cylinder, liquid-cooled, sleeve valve, piston aero engine, designed by Major Frank Halford and built by D. Napier & Son during World War II. The engine evolved to become one of the most powerful inline piston aircraft engines in the world, developing from 2,200 hp (1,600 kW) in its earlier versions to 3,500 hp (2,600 kW) in late-model prototypes.
The Bristol Hercules is a 14-cylinder two-row radial aircraft engine designed by Sir Roy Fedden and produced by the Bristol Engine Company starting in 1939. It was the most numerous of their single sleeve valve designs, powering many aircraft in the mid-World War II timeframe.
The Centaurus was the final development of the Bristol Engine Company's series of sleeve valve radial aircraft engines. The Centaurus is an 18-cylinder, two-row design that eventually delivered over 3,000 hp (2,200 kW). The engine was introduced into service late in the Second World War and was one of the most powerful aircraft piston engines to see service.
The Napier Nomad is a British diesel aircraft engine designed and built by Napier & Son in 1949. They combined a piston engine with a turbine to recover energy from the exhaust and thereby improve fuel economy. Two versions were tested, the complex Nomad I which used two propellers, each driven by the mechanically independent stages, and the Nomad II, using the turbo-compound principle, coupled the two parts to drive a single propeller. The Nomad II had the lowest specific fuel consumption figures seen up to that time. Despite this the Nomad project was cancelled in 1955 having spent £5.1 million on development, as most interest had passed to turboprop designs.
The Rolls-Royce Vulture was a British aero engine developed shortly before World War II that was designed and built by Rolls-Royce Limited. The Vulture used the unusual "X-24" configuration, whereby four cylinder blocks derived from the Rolls-Royce Peregrine were joined by a common crankshaft supported by a single crankcase. The engine was originally designed to produce around 1,750 horsepower (1,300 kW) but problems with the Vulture design meant that the engines were derated to around 1,450 to 1,550 hp in service by limiting the maximum rpm.
The Packard V-1650 Merlin is a version of the Rolls-Royce Merlin aircraft engine, produced under license in the United States by the Packard Motor Car Company. The engine was licensed to expand production of the Rolls-Royce Merlin for British use. The engine also filled a gap in the U.S. at a time when similarly powered American-made engines were not available.
The Jumo 210 was Junkers Motoren's first production inverted V12 gasoline aircraft engine, first produced in the early 1930s. Depending on the version it produced between 610 and 730 PS and can be considered a counterpart of the Rolls-Royce Kestrel in many ways. Although originally intended to be used in almost all pre-war designs, rapid progress in aircraft design quickly relegated it to the small end of the power scale by the late 1930s. Almost all aircraft designs switched to the much larger Daimler-Benz DB 600, so the 210 was produced only for a short time before Junkers responded with a larger engine of their own, the Junkers Jumo 211.
The Rolls-Royce Griffon is a British 37-litre capacity, 60-degree V-12, liquid-cooled aero engine designed and built by Rolls-Royce Limited. In keeping with company convention, the Griffon was named after a bird of prey, in this case the griffon vulture.
The Rolls-Royce Peregrine was a 21-litre (1,300 cu in), 885-horsepower (660 kW) liquid-cooled V-12 aero engine designed and built by the British manufacturer Rolls-Royce in the late 1930s. It was essentially the ultimate development of the company's Kestrel engine, which had seen widespread use in military aircraft of the pre-war period.
The Rolls-Royce Eagle Mk XXII is a British 24-cylinder, sleeve valve, H-block aero engine of 46 litre displacement. It was designed and built in the early-1940s by Rolls-Royce Limited and first ran in 1944. It was liquid-cooled, of flat H configuration with two crankshafts and was capable of 3,200 horsepower at 18 psi boost.
Rolls-Royce produced a range of piston engine types for aircraft use in the first half of the 20th century. Production of own-design engines ceased in 1955 with the last versions of the Griffon; licensed production of Teledyne Continental Motors general aviation engines was carried out by the company in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Klimov VK-107 was a V-12 liquid-cooled piston aircraft engine used by Soviet aircraft during World War II.
In an internal combustion engine, a supercharger compresses the intake gas, forcing more air into the engine in order to produce more power for a given displacement.
A turbo-compound engine is a reciprocating engine that employs a turbine to recover energy from the exhaust gases. Instead of using that energy to drive a turbocharger as found in many high-power aircraft engines, the energy is instead sent to the output shaft to increase the total power delivered by the engine. The turbine is usually mechanically connected to the crankshaft, as on the Wright R-3350 Duplex-Cyclone, but electric and hydraulic power recovery systems have been investigated as well.
The Rolls-Royce Pennine was a British 46-litre air-cooled sleeve valve engine with 24 cylinders arranged in an X formation. It was an enlarged version of the 22-litre Exe; a prototype engine was built and tested, but never flew. The project was terminated in 1945, being superseded by the jet engine.
The Rolls-Royce Exe, or Boreas, was a 24-cylinder air-cooled X block sleeve valve aircraft engine intended primarily for the new Fairey Fleet Air Arm aircraft, particularly the Fairey Barracuda. The Exe was relatively powerful for its era, producing about 1,100 hp (820 kW). This is notable given the relatively small 1,300 cubic inches (22 L) displacement, the Merlin requiring 1,600 cubic inches (27 L) for approximately the same power level. The X-24 layout made this quite a compact engine.
The Rolls-Royce Eagle XVI was a British experimental 16 cylinder aero engine designed and developed by Rolls-Royce Limited in 1925. The engine was test run but did not fly, the project, together with the planned larger variant, the Eagle XX, was cancelled in favour of the Rolls-Royce Kestrel, that was being developed concurrently.
Internal combustion engines come in a wide variety of types, but have certain family resemblances, and thus share many common types of components.
