Fairey Monarch engine production

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PMN1

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The Monarch was one of the 'also rans' despite appearing to be quite an interesting engine.

Has anyone heard any suggestions that plans for the Monarch to go into production were much more advanced than had previously been thought- By Wolsey in the UK and more particularly by Ford in the US (this was pre Pearl Harbour) with the Ford engines going into UK airframes.
 
Had this sent to me a while back,


With the P24 design - there was no "coupling" of its two component halves - They were two entirely separate engines - one of which drove its propeller through the hollow driveshaft of the other. Other than that there was absolutely no mechanical linkage between the two "halves" at all – So very little to go wrong.

The P24 Monarch was a very advanced engine if the surviving details are true...

Compressed Glycol /Water Cooling - As first used in Rolls Royce production engines (Merlin XII) from the end of 1940. RPM of 3,000 (same as wartime Merlins) 2 Stage, 4 Speed supercharger (Rolls Royce only ever managed a 2 speed Supercharger on the Merlin and only managed a 3-speed supercharger on post-war Griffons).

With a 2-stage, 4 speed supercharger you would expect the Monarch to have had a very impressive performance at height.

There were two designs - The 16 Cylinder H-16 "Prince" of 1.540 hp and the 24 cylinder P-24 "Monarch" of 2,240hp (perhaps more).

The H-16 had only a two-speed single stage supercharger.

The H-16 could well have boosted a Battle Bomber to close to 300 mph - who knows with a Monarch - 350 mph +???

The Fulmar and Barracuda could have had similar boosts in performance – along with "Twin-engine" reliability.

Both the H-16 and P-24 used essentially the same cylinders as the earlier P12 Prince - Which had first flown in 1934, and it used poppet-valves, and so would have had none of the problems Bristol + Napier had with sleeve-Valves, so it is by no means unreasonable to think that with a bit of government backing the H-16 and P-24 could have been in production as early as 1938, and certainly by 1940. As it was CR Fairey said to have spent at least 1 million pounds (at today’s prices) out of his own pocket on the project.


The information on the Fairey family of engines is somewhat fragmentary...

The Prince 1 and II were just normal liquid-cooled "V" engines - very close in performance to the very late R-Royce Kestrel and the Peregrine.

The Prince H-16 was essentially two lots of 8 cylinders from Prince 2 engines each rearranged into a "U" shape - one on top of the other to form a "H" (but not a true "H" engine - two separate halves) - This is the only one we have firm data for weight on ... 2,180 Lb - a bit heavier than the weight of a Griffon (1,980 lb)- in it's prototype form it was not as powerful as a Griffon - giving only 1,600 hp - but this is not far off the 1,720 hp of the very early Griffons (although they were later developed to 2,500 hp). Because of it's layout the Prince H-16 would have had a bigger frontal area - leading to a somewhat "blunt" nose on any aircraft it was fitted to - unless a particularly large spinner or extension shaft was used (both these methods would add weight). -

The Monarch prototype was rated at 2,400 hp - but it was considered capable of development to 3,000 hp - no figures survive for its weight. The extra eight cylinders would have made the engine longer - but the frontal area would have been the same as the Prince H-16. I think it's fair to approximate this engine to a Bristol Centaurus in terms of weight.

I think most aircraft designers would have used the more powerful Monarch engine if given the choice - But there might have been some designs (the Fairey Fulmar and Barracuda spring to mind) where the Prince H-16 would have been a handy stop-gap to avoid major redesign for the extra weight of the Monarch.

As a general rule I think it's fair to say any aircraft with a late model Hercules or a Griffon engine could probably have used the Prince H-16 instead.

Similarly any aircraft designed with the RR Vulture or Centaurus could have taken a Monarch without too much redesign.
 
http://www.tgplanes.com/Public/snitz/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=290

I'm sure that I've seen the comment somewhere - quite recently - that the Battle was designed around Fairey's high-powered two-in-one engine - which it was why it was lame when fitted with the Merlin.
Interesting, too, that someone went to the trouble of testing the P.24 Battle in the US.
 
Fairey's (and Wolseley)'s absence from aero-engines was political, not technical. Both Sir Richard F and Lord Nuffield wanted in.
1920s: Air Ministry "Ring" to spread scarce work around, keeping many, lean, not some, fat. Bristol, Napier, RR in big engines; ASM and DH tolerated to potter because their parents were "in" airframes. Fairey sought the same, licencing Curtiss D-12 as Felix, rebuffed, passing it "for info" to RR.
1935: Aero as the dot.com of the day; investors enter, newcomers in airframe second-sourcing...but not in engines. Big Power was coming (Deer/Boarhound, Hercules/Centaurus, Sabre, Crecy), consuming RAE's resources, no need/purpose in wetnursing newfolk. Fairey's hands full with new Stockport site. Sir Richard was seconded, 1940, to MAP in US; accepted his lot would not include engines. (Nuffield declined in 1936 to put Wolseley into Herbert Austin's Bristol types Production Group, and sulked, out of Aero work, until new Minister Kingsley Wood in Spring,1938 put him into Tiger Moth at Cowley, Spitfire at CBAF).
 
True, there was a lot of control exercised out of Whitehall. I expect that they reasoned that there was a max to peacetime military demand and manufacturing capacity and that they could only support so many big engine manufacturers. Notably even the US, in WW2, got through with three domestic producers of large engines (Wright, P&W, Allison); the UK, with a much smaller infrastructure, still had RR, Bristol and Napier.
However, it's interesting to regard Battle/P-16 as Fairey's successor to the Fox/D-12 - and it explains why the Battle was such a loser, when it didn't have the power it was designed for. With the bigger, two-in-one engine, it would have been more like the He119.
 
Hi
Smalll correction,
"The Prince H-16 was essentially two lots of 8 cylinders from Prince 2 engines each rearranged into a "U" shape - one on top of the other to form a "H" (but not a true "H" engine - two separate halves) - This is the only one we have firm data for weight on ... 2,180 Lb -"
2,180lbs was the mass of the projected P-24 not the the P-16 H.
The mass of the Fairey P-24 as flown was less massive.





PMN1 said:
Had this sent to me a while back,


With the P24 design - there was no "coupling" of its two component halves - They were two entirely separate engines - one of which drove its propeller through the hollow driveshaft of the other. Other than that there was absolutely no mechanical linkage between the two "halves" at all – So very little to go wrong.

The P24 Monarch was a very advanced engine if the surviving details are true...

Compressed Glycol /Water Cooling - As first used in Rolls Royce production engines (Merlin XII) from the end of 1940. RPM of 3,000 (same as wartime Merlins) 2 Stage, 4 Speed supercharger (Rolls Royce only ever managed a 2 speed Supercharger on the Merlin and only managed a 3-speed supercharger on post-war Griffons).

With a 2-stage, 4 speed supercharger you would expect the Monarch to have had a very impressive performance at height.

There were two designs - The 16 Cylinder H-16 "Prince" of 1.540 hp and the 24 cylinder P-24 "Monarch" of 2,240hp (perhaps more).

The H-16 had only a two-speed single stage supercharger.

The H-16 could well have boosted a Battle Bomber to close to 300 mph - who knows with a Monarch - 350 mph +???

The Fulmar and Barracuda could have had similar boosts in performance – along with "Twin-engine" reliability.

Both the H-16 and P-24 used essentially the same cylinders as the earlier P12 Prince - Which had first flown in 1934, and it used poppet-valves, and so would have had none of the problems Bristol + Napier had with sleeve-Valves, so it is by no means unreasonable to think that with a bit of government backing the H-16 and P-24 could have been in production as early as 1938, and certainly by 1940. As it was CR Fairey said to have spent at least 1 million pounds (at today’s prices) out of his own pocket on the project.


The information on the Fairey family of engines is somewhat fragmentary...

The Prince 1 and II were just normal liquid-cooled "V" engines - very close in performance to the very late R-Royce Kestrel and the Peregrine.

The Prince H-16 was essentially two lots of 8 cylinders from Prince 2 engines each rearranged into a "U" shape - one on top of the other to form a "H" (but not a true "H" engine - two separate halves) - This is the only one we have firm data for weight on ... 2,180 Lb - a bit heavier than the weight of a Griffon (1,980 lb)- in it's prototype form it was not as powerful as a Griffon - giving only 1,600 hp - but this is not far off the 1,720 hp of the very early Griffons (although they were later developed to 2,500 hp). Because of it's layout the Prince H-16 would have had a bigger frontal area - leading to a somewhat "blunt" nose on any aircraft it was fitted to - unless a particularly large spinner or extension shaft was used (both these methods would add weight). -

The Monarch prototype was rated at 2,400 hp - but it was considered capable of development to 3,000 hp - no figures survive for its weight. The extra eight cylinders would have made the engine longer - but the frontal area would have been the same as the Prince H-16. I think it's fair to approximate this engine to a Bristol Centaurus in terms of weight.

I think most aircraft designers would have used the more powerful Monarch engine if given the choice - But there might have been some designs (the Fairey Fulmar and Barracuda spring to mind) where the Prince H-16 would have been a handy stop-gap to avoid major redesign for the extra weight of the Monarch.

As a general rule I think it's fair to say any aircraft with a late model Hercules or a Griffon engine could probably have used the Prince H-16 instead.

Similarly any aircraft designed with the RR Vulture or Centaurus could have taken a Monarch without too much redesign.
Click to expand...
 
Liinks to pix
P24 at Yeovilton and the propeller assembly
Somwhere I have recorded information from one of the engine test engineers at Fairey .. who migrated to Armstrong Siddeley and eventually became a member of RR (takeovers) which is where I met him... viruses (PC not me) are a probem at moment will provide data soon!
 
There is a fair bit of history in H.A. Taylor's book Fairey Aircraft Since 1915. The idea originated in 1936 and was probably cooked up for naval carrier use, to provide twin-engine power with a single-engine central propeller layout. Fairey did not have a test rig man enough so they tested each half independently before sticking it in Fairey Battle K9370. There is a photo of it installed with an ordinary three-bladed prop to test one half of it. The variable-pitch contra-prop is thought to have been the first of this type to be flight tested. They flew it from 1939 until 1941 then sent it to RAE Farnborough.

The P.24 was considered for the Hawker Tornado/Typhoon but dropped due to wartime production pressures.

General Arnold saw it and got the idea of Ford-built units to power the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt. so K9730 complete with engine and propellers was shipped out to Wright Field where it eventually logged some 250 hours. One other engine was sent to Farnborough, another was being prepared for the States when Pearl Harbour led to a focus on existing engines and the project died the death.

K9730 came home in 1943 and and one P.24 was, at the time Taylor was writing in 1974, on display in the Fleet Air Arm Museum, Yeovilton.

Fairey's engine venture began with a proposal to license-build the Curtiss D-12 as the Felix and use it in the Fox high-speed bomber. Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard personally authorised a squadron of D-12 powered Foxes in order to embarrass the British engine industry out of its complacency. The end result was that Rolls-Royce came up with the Kestrel and it powered the Fox II.

The larger P.12 Prince, also a V-12, was a direct competitor to the Rolls-Royce PV.12 so work was initially done in secrecy. Its designer Captain Graham Forsyth had previously worked on the Napier Lion and the Rolls-Royce Kestrel among other well-known engines. It was offered in two versions, a ca. 700 hp Prince and a ca. 800 hp Super-Prince, and after flight tests in a Fox II, in 1935 a V-16 variant was also proposed. By then the PV.12 had been named the Merlin and you can guess the rest.

The P.24 was different in that each half was of vertically-opposed or I configuration, having one bank of six cylinders the right way up and the other upside down. The two halves each had their own crank shaft half way up and shared a common crankcase, while the shafts rotated in opposite directions. Each drove its propeller through its own reduction gear.
 
So, does anyone have performance figures for the Monarch powered Battle?
 
steelpillow said:
The P.24 was different in that each half was of vertically-opposed or I configuration, having one bank of six cylinders the right way up and the other upside down. The two halves each had their own crank shaft half way up and shared a common crankcase, while the shafts rotated in opposite directions. Each drove its propeller through its own reduction gear.
Click to expand...

I can't quite understand this description. The engine was configured in an "I" shape, does that mean the cylinders were more like an "--" or they were more like:

__
|
__

?

If the former, was the direction of movement of the cylinders left to right, towards each other with the crankcases in the middle or if the latter, did the top cylinders move one way and the bottom cylinders the other?
 
Kadija_Man said:
I can't quite understand this description. The engine was configured in an "I" shape, does that mean the cylinders were more like an "--" or they were more like:

__
|
__

?

If the former, was the direction of movement of the cylinders left to right, towards each other with the crankcases in the middle or if the latter, did the top cylinders move one way and the bottom cylinders the other?
Click to expand...

Each half-engine had cylinders aligned vertically, in two vertically-opposed rows: one up, one down, with the crank shaft in the middle, something like this:
Code: 
 —
 |
 o
 |
 —
Putting two side by side:
Code: 
 — —
 | |
 o*o
 | |
 — —
The crankcase surrounded both crankshafts (shown o ), with the central reduction gear (shown * ) presumably mounted on the front of it. The cylinder cases were separate banks on each side.
 

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