The Airplane Engine

This volume attempts two things: to formulate existing knowledge of the functioning of the airplane engine and its auxiliaries; and to present and discuss the essential constructive details of those engines whose excellence has resulted in their survival. The material here collected is largely new; very little of it could have been written before the war and only a small fraction was available for publication before 1919. It is based mainly on the researches and engine developments originating during the war and resulting from the wars urgencies. The researches have been carried out almost exclusively under governmental auspices; in the United States at theB ureau of Standards and at the A irS ervice experimental plant atM cC ook Field; in Great Britain at the Royal Aircraft Factory and theN ational Physical Laboratory; in France and Germany at equivalent institutions. Many of the results of these investigations were published confidentially during the war in Reports of theB ureau of Standards; in Bulletins and Technical Orders of the Airplane Engineering Division of the U. S. A rmy; in Reports of the (B ritish) Advisory Committee for A eronautics; in Bulletins de laS ection Technique de I A ronautique Militaire; and inT echnische Berichte. This material has now become available and much of it has been published in the Reports of the (U. S.) National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and in the technical press. Similarly, the constructive details of most of the existing airplane engines are now available, chiefly from descriptions of captured machines. The German and Austrian engines captured by theB ritish were subjected to a technical analysis which has set a new standard in such matters. Not only were the engines and their auxiliaries tested exhaustively for performance but all the parts were minutely measured, loads and stresses calculated, and the meta(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)