> Paul, best to you and Robin for the holidays and New Year.
> Thanks again for all your  work to provide the rotary
> engine faithful such
> wonderful information resources for further development efforts.
>
> In your comprehensive files you probably have the following
> reference but I
> keep forgetting to ask you if you have the British Mallard
> Press's aviation
> reference book with it's narrative and nice summary
> illustrations/schematicsof the Wright Turbo Compound family of
> engines.  Everett and I got it when
> researching possible ways of recovering the large amount of
> energy of the
> Wankel going out the exhaust.  The book's short section on
> the turbo
> compound engines also includes a reference to subsequent British
> work where
> their engineers concluded: "the future lay in compound power
> plants." leading
> to engineers to consider a different type of compounding (than
> the Wright)
> which led to the Napier Nomad in 1950-57 where a 12 cylinder
> diesel was used
> to drive an axial turbo shaft united geared to the diesel with a
> variable-ratio coupling with objective of lowest possible fuel
> consumption."It  notes those promising development efforts
> were "... swept away by the
> rising tide of gas-turbines."
>
> We also looked at non-compounded alternatives including the
> book's summary
> review of the German aviation diesel designs.  It has a
> cutaway illustration
> of the 2-cycle Junkers/Jumo aviation diesel, and notes a version
> of this
> engine had the best SFC of any WWII engine @ .35.  As with
> the rotary, it
> opened and closed ports with the driven component...no valve train.
> Evidently this engine allowed them during the war to fly a large
> aircraftnon-stop to New York and back to evaluate possible
> bombing options.  Our
> earliest rotary work was with a rotary diesel but we abandoned
> it for many
> reasons including those you have noted regarding diesels.
>
> Sure hope you can motivate an individual or group with requisite
> resources(tough in the current economic climate) to pursue the
> rotary turbo
> compound concept while we all continue more low cost development
> work to get
> the best possible efficiencies using the basic homogeneous
> charge Mazda.  In
> this regard, last night I went back and looked at our file notes of
> comparative flight test results in the 90's.  This was
> partially driven by
> consternation  resulting from the findings of the rotary v.
> recip flyoff
> written up last year by my friend Ken Scott at Van's, where the
> results show
> the rotary powered RV-8's burning much more fuel than the
> Lycoming powered
> aircraft. Part of this may be attributable to test methodology
> and part due
> to limits of the the single lever fuel systems used on the
> rotaries.  With
> our earlier mechanical fuel injection systems on the same basic
> configuration engines, with proper leaning and only fundamental
> attention to
> cooling drag/installation issues which were never refined due to time
> constraints, our rotary engined aircraft in the same model
> aircraft would
> consistently fly the identical mission on less fuel than a air
> cooled recip,
> even though the modified Mazda rotary engines had a higher
> SFC.    Your
> postings of the Mazda technical papers shows their efforts to
> reconfigurethe ports reduce overlap has substantively improved
> SFC with the Renesis
> engines....8 to15 percent as I remember.  Anybody who has
> done development
> work knows that SFC gains of this magnitude are significant to
> say the
> least.  Has anybody in the group conducted flight tests
> using an essentially
> stock Mazda Renesis engine configuration with stock
> porting?....using engine
> power settings for extended cruise power settings, and if so
> results?  I
> apologize if this is an old subject for your group and the
> subject of prior
> review and discussion.
>
> Paul, thanks again for all your great work.
>
> Steve Beckham.
>
> That is one book I don't have but I wish I did.
> Here are a few shots of the Napier Nomad.
>
> Paul Lamar
>
>

Hi Steve Beckham,

I wish to salute your contribution to this newsletter, Sir.  Thank you.

Marc Josepn