Groundbreaking: RAF Spitfires such as these, above, were using super-fast fuel developed in the U.S. to win the Battle of Britain against German forces.
Posted on 05/12/2009 4:25:26 PM PDT by naturalman1975
A 'miracle fuel' imported from the U.S. helped Spitfire and Hurricane fighter pilots win the Battle of Britain, it has been claimed.
American science writer Tim Palucka said the high-octane fuel was made using a process invented by a Frenchman and supplied to the RAF by the U.S. just in time for battle.
He said the 100-octane fuel helped the aeroplanes gain superior altitude, manoeuvrability and rate of climb.
Groundbreaking: RAF Spitfires such as these, above, were using super-fast fuel developed in the U.S. to win the Battle of Britain against German forces.
The superior fuel replaced the 87-octane gasoline which was previously used in the planes, with the imported gas allowing British planes to achieve crucial dominance over German Air Force, the Luftwaffe.
Mr Palucka said the super-fast fuel increased the Spitfire's speed by 25 mph at sea level and by 34 mph at 10,000 feet.
In mid-1940 this extra speed may have given the British fighters the edge over the Luftwaffe above the English Channel and in the skies of London and south east England.
Mr Palucka said: 'Luftwaffe pilots couldn't believe they were facing the same planes they had fought successfully over France a few months before.
'The planes were the same, but the fuel wasn't.'
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I seem to recall that British aviation gas was the main reason for the P-38’s underperformance over Europe.
Fair trade, we gave them gas, their food did the same for us.
100 Octane avgas was largely pioneered by Jimmy Doolittle when he worked as a consultant for Shell in the 30’s looking to improve the performance of both military and racing planes.
One of the great men of 20th Century America - We could never be so lucky again.
I always liked Clark Super 100 gasoline. Later, I’d fill up at small airports (Beemer Bike)...that’s where the best gas is.
Women and children affected most.
oh good, I had always thought we owed them one for giving the US the Jet Engine, but I guess we are even.
Wouldn’t have done much good without the bravery and skill of the RAF pilots.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Houdry
Eugene Houdry (April 18, 1892 - July 18, 1962) was a French mechanical engineer who invented catalytic cracking of petroleum feed stocks. He originally focused on using lignite (brown coal) as a feedstock, but switched to using heavy liquid tars after moving to the United States in 1930. Although others had experimented with catalysts for this purpose, they were stymied by the fact that the catalyst ceased to work after a time. Houdry diagnosed the nature of the problem and developed a method to regenerate the catalyst. The first Houdry unit was built at Sun Oil's Marcus Hook, PA oil refinery in 1937. Many more units were built by the 1940s and were instrumental for US wartime aviation gasoline production. Among others at the company who helped Houdry in the development of the catalytic cracking process was Alex Golden Oblad.
The process was further developed by two MIT engineers, Warren K. Lewis and Edwin R. Gilliland, under contract to Standard Oil of New Jersey, now ExxonMobil. They developed the process into fluid catalytic cracking, which solved the problem of having to shut down the process to burn the coke off the catalyst by using a continuously circulating fluidized catalyst made of a fine zeolite powder. This process is still in widespread use, especially in the US where gasoline is in high demand compared to other refined products.
Houdry later became interested in automotive catalysts, and the catalytic converter was one of approximately 100 patents that he received. but nothing came of it until the 1970s because the tetraethyl lead that was still in use in the 1950s and 1960s poisoned the catalyst.
Houdry had served as a lietenant in a tank company in the French Army during World War One.
I’m glad for whatever help we gave, but what won that battle was the courage of those young British lions who went toe to toe with the Luftwaffe. They deserve the credit.
)
Their food gave us gas?
So why hasn’t Obu**head apologized to the German people yet? We had an unfair advantage, and didn’t share it with them during the war. How many Germans were killed because we took unfair advantage?
He is working his way through apologizing for every other American advancement or success... so why didn’t he cover this? And when will he start issuing TARP funds to Germany as reparations?
/sarc
I don’t understand how it improved performance much unless they raised compression and/or advanced spark timing to take advantage of it.
Color me skeptical.
(a) Is this a new claim? I’ve never heard of it.
(b) Do high-octane fuels themselves provide more power, or are they more powerful because they permit higher compression...which begs the question, were the Spitfire engines capable of rigging for higher compression without radical redesign?
Of possible interest to you.
Yes, eat a banger with some steak and kidney pie and prepare for the outcome.
Yup. Had the very same thing told to me by former P-38 pilots at the Reno Air Show years ago. They also said that their fellow ‘38 pilots in the Pacific could not understand why the ‘38 wasn’t more successful during the European air war, but after the war at ‘38 get-togethers, the ETO pilots filled in the Pacific pilots on the horrible state of the British fuel handling.
When one looks at the state of the Brit auto industry, their aviation industry, etc post-war... one gets a very real sense of just how atrocious their QC was on most anything industrial.
We sent the Brits a batch of P-38s that weren't turbocharged.
They referred to them as "Castrated Lightning".
Yes, it is a new claim - and there are others who share your scepticism and express their views in the part of the article I didn’t excerpt.
Great autobiography, and aptly named. Great man.
I suspect they must have.
Well actually, the motors were not the same.
The higher octane dont do anything without higher compression combustion cylinders - they would have had to mill the heads or change the pistons/connecting rods.
I have a hard time swallowing this story. To take the full advantage of 100 octane gasoline, you need a higher compression engine. Simply changing gasoline to a higher octane helps, but not that much without engine mods.
Not to get all picky here, since this isn't a science article, but the fact is, higher octane fuels burn more slowly than lower octane fuels. The rationale for using higher octane fuels is that it allows for more advanced spark timings, expansion of the slower burning fuel provides power through more of the power cycle, and lowers the chance of detonation reducing performance and engine life.
(b) Do high-octane fuels themselves provide more power, or are they more powerful because they permit higher compression...which begs the question, were the Spitfire engines capable of rigging for higher compression without radical redesign?
No, it's not really a new claim - I recall reading that Jimmy Doolittle was instrumental in pushing for 100-octane AvGas in the 1930s - most fuel was 87 octane then, on either side of the Atlantic. I'm not positive, but I think Doolittle talked Shell Oil into producing the stuff.
As for the engines, the higher octane simply allowed the supercharger boost level to be raised.
Thanks for the story and the reply. I’m a bit of a buff, and I always like the opportunity to improve my understanding.
There's two side to every coin. The P-51 would never have been what it was without the British 'merlin' engine. Also during the early years of that war, our own torpedoes were absolute junk.
Agreed, somethings not right about this story. You can put 100LL AV Gas in a Yugo and it still a Yugo.
And most importantly of all - more supercharger boost.
plus, that high compression is hell on spark plugs and I wonder if they had problems with fouling.
Boost boys....they can turn up the boost.....
Good fuel, brave pilots, and RADAR.
Apparently the change to the Merlin engine was fairly simple.
The extra power was generated by allowing the supercharger to boost more pressure.
This essentially has the same effect as raising the compression ratio.
True. Especially important in the RR Merlin. My comment was prompted by the "super-fast fuel" part of the headline ... most people don't know that higher octane actually equals slower burn rate ... :)
old news
Hard to say.
They could have bumped up their superchargers a little. They could’ve leaned out their fuel mixture a little. They could’ve advanced spark a little.
Back then, spark advance and fuel mixture was probably a manually controlled parameter, in flight by the pilot via levers on the control panel. Even the superchargers may have been adjustable from the cockpit by use of some kind of bleed valve.
ping
Thank you gentlemen, I learned something new today.
The Spitfire’s Merlin was supercharged.
Yes, exactly. Well, on a Rolls-Royce V-12, yes... on a Yugo, not so much. :-)
That's what the Luftwaffe pilots noticed - faster in level flight, higher rate of climb, higher ceiling - those things that become apparent really quickly in a dogfight.
He finally allowed the fighters to go after the Luftwaffe after rescinding the order to protect the bombers.
The higher octane ratings enable higher compression ratios without pre-detonation.
The Merlin-powered planes (Spitfire, Mustang, etc) did not use a turbocharger, as the US planes did. The US planes (P-38, P-47, B-17, B-24, F-6, F-8, etc) used a turbo because it allowed the engineers to simply set up the maximum boost level and then fix this to an aneroid that pushed up the boost as you went higher in altitude into thinner air. The turbosupercharger was considered a specialized war material at the time - production priority, security issues, the whole deal. One of the side-effects was that planes being sold to the Brits on Lend-Lease were not equipped with turbo’s - eg, when the P-51 was originally the A-12, it was shipped to the UK with a normally aspirated Allison V-1710 engine. Up to 12K feet, it was quite a nice plane. Above that, it just petered out. So the Brits stuffed a Merlin with their blower into it, and the rest, as they say, was glorious history.
The Merlin had a geared supercharger, not a turbo. The gearing on the Merlin had two settings - “low” and “high” altitude. Mustang pilots have told me that the “nominal” setting was for “low” up to about 10K feet, and somewhere above 10 to 12K elevation, they’d shift to the “high” boost setting on the blower. The guys at the Reno air races, however, are given 120 to 130 octane fuel, and they sometimes run their engines in the “high boost” setting at 5500 to 6000 feet elevation there at Stead. Without that super-high, specialized fuel that Shell brings in just for the races, the engines would likely fail from pre-det in a day.
The higher boost on the blower would cause all manner of pre-detonation on the Merlin with crappy, British (but I repeat myself) low-octane gas. This was also a huge problem on the P-38’s, because their engines and turbo’s were set up to use 100-octane US fuel. The Brit fuel was also reputed to have quite a bit of water in it as well, but that’s a whole ‘nuther issue.
Anyway, long story short to answer your question: Yes, you can increase the compression of a Otto-cycle engine on the fly. You simply cram more air into it, effectively raising the compression ratio with the pre-compression of the blower. But you need to solve the pre-det problem in order to see any good come of the boost. OK, so how do you do that?
1. Higher octane fuel. You can use toluene, ethanol or methanol (among other additives) for an octane boost. If you’ve read any of my rantings on how ethanol could be used to increase auto performance, I’ve explained this and how ethanol would result in a mileage boost to cars if the automakers would or could make an assumption of higher minimum octanes due to ethanol in the gasoline. There are engine designs that develop much higher thermal efficiencies with the octane boost of ethanol in their fuel.
You can also use water injection. The Merlin in the Mustang was adapted to use a water+methanol injection when the engine was pushed into “WEP - War Emerency Power” — ie, “Holy *&(*&, Let’s get moving!” speed. There was a wire gate on the Mustang throttle - when you pushed the throttle up to the gate, you were at full rated military power. When you crammed the throttle past the gate, you were into WEP. You had something like 5 minutes max at WEP and your ground crew had to tear down your engine for inspection and/or repair after WEP usage. Boost in power at WEP? Oh, about 600+HP - from about 1300HP up to over 2200 HP. In other words, they were ramming the fuel into that thing along with one heck of a lot of high-pressure air.
2. You can use something like a Miller Cycle on the engine, where you adjust the valve timing to compensate for the blower boost and keep the net compression ratio on the compression stroke down to a point where you don’t pre-det. You maintain a longer power stroke with the valves closed as long as possible to extract the maximum power.
What is the best way to go? A turbo with an adjustable waste gate to control the boost, coupled with a pre-det detector. A computer could push the boost up to the point of pre-det, then back off - thereby giving you more power when you use higher octane fuel, and backing down the effective compression ratio when you’re burning donkey piss as our guys in the ETO had to do.
Yes I thought it was Sunoco (aka Sun Oil) in PA.
Sad because the UK largely is turning England over to Islam. At least they have not elected a Muslim to lead their country...yet.
And ULTRA.
During the Battle of Britain, Ultra intelligence was used by Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding to optimally deploy the limited RAF Fighter Command assets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra
What are those dark brown discs on the lower right? And what are those white flecks inside them?
True, but put a blower on the Yugo with low test gas and you have a grenade.
A friend of his a Lt Mitty who flew the Spitfire during the Battle of Britian said that the new supercharged Spits with the 100 Octane Gas gave the british pilots the edge 'cause the engine produced more power with less "Topoketa, Topoketa, Topoketa, Topoketa."
I wouldn’t call it super fast fuel ... high octane perhaps. Fuel isn’t fast ... I use 110LL in the Cessna’s I fly .... automotive fuel had high octane way back. Ethyl ....my readings on it was that it was developed in the 1920’s ...and they had it in England then too ... it was world wide. Can’t see how high compression engines could run on 87 octane; they would knock like crazy ...it’s the basic blend of heptane and Iso-octane which comes out at 87 octane ... need boosters to increase the octane level ... OK, call me a spoiler but I can’t see the claim ....
I think he is going to give the Germans our farm states as reparation. We get to keep all the big cities.
Looks good to me.
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