How a Russian Spy Made The Mustang P-51 Faster
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Imagine you’re an Irish engineer working for the British Royal Aircraft Establishment. Your name is Frederick William Meredith. You are Irish by birth but one day you discover Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto and you really like it.
You like it so much that you decide to attend the Moscow Victory Day Parade and then betray your own country and become a Soviet agent and Spy which forwarded various classified military documents to the Russian Armed Forces.
A few years later your treason gets discovered. What do you think happens next? Well based on the crime it would be reasonable to assume that you lose your job at the Royal Aircraft Establishment and get sent to prison like all the other traitors.
But none of that happens. And that’s because you’re an engineer. And not just any engineer. You’re an exceptional engineer, so good at your job that not only do you not get arrested. You get to keep your job too. The authorities decide to take a calculated risk and continue to employ you because of your “outstanding technical” ability.
The Supermarine Spitfire and the Mustang P51d, probably two of the most iconic allied fighter airplanes of the WW2
Towards the end of the war, both were equipped with nearly the same variants of the legendary Rolls-Royce Merlin Engine.
So both aircraft made pretty much the same power at the same altitude. But the P51 Mustang was noticeably faster. How?
Yes, the P51 was developed after the spitfire so it had more modern aerodynamics, which certainly contributed to a higher top speed. But that’s only one part of the answer. The other is this intake right here which was designed entirely based on the work of Irish engineer Frederick William Meredith.
To understand why this intake is so important, we first must understand what limited further power increases of piston engine aircraft.
You see the Second World War was a horrible time for humanity but an incredible time for technology. But most piston engine tech, what it really does is that it finds ways to stuff more air and fuel inside a cylinder. The more air and fuel you manage to stuff inside a cylinder the more powerful your combustion. The more powerful your combustion the more heat it generates. So to prevent the engine from overheating you install a larger radiator to better cool the engine. But now you have a problem - big radiators cause big drag.
Drag actually increases with the square of air speed. So the faster you fly the worse the drag. This ultimately leads to a situation where an aircraft with a less powerful engine but smaller radiator achieves a higher top speed than an aircraft with a more powerful engine and larger radiators.
So in the end it was engine cooling that became the ceiling for aircraft piston engine power. But Frederick William Meredith didn’t like that and decided to solve it and he did because he didn’t see the heat generated by engines as waste….he saw it as an opportunity which ultimately lead to the P51 Mustang being designed from the onset with Meredith’s ideas in mind.
At low speeds there is no Meredith effect. We can’t create energy out of thin air, we need something to work with. We need the kinetic energy of the fast moving surrounding air to convert it into slow moving pressurized air so that we can transfer as much waste heat energy as possible onto the air so that we can expand that air to produce our thrust.
If we don’t have the kinetic energy to start with than we can’t really do our thing, this is why the rear flaps of the radiator scoop are open when the airplane is moving at slow speed. By opening the flaps we remove the restriction in the back which eliminates the thermal choke at the radiator, allowing the maximum volume of air to pass over the radiator and prevents engine overheating.
If you think about it the radiator belly scoop of the mustang is basically a mini combustionless jet engine because it functions on the same principle and contains within all the basic elements of the brayton cycle. That being said the net thrust produced by the radiator scoop was minimal and only possible in the right conditions, what to scoop did in reality is that it canceled out most of the drag produced by the radiators, which as we have seen contributed to a noticeably higher top speed.
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00:00 When You're an Irish Communist But Your Engineering Slaps
01:50 The Same Engine But Different Top Speeds
03:01 The Top Speed Ceiling
06:05 War Thunder
07:29 What Goes In Must Come Out
09:59 Slow Down, Heat, Expand
13:39 Canceling out Drag Increasing Speed
16:54 Meredith Effect in Formula 1?
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