Water injection to increase horsepower

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Posted

I ran across an interesting video with details why Germany had a faster fighter than the P51 Mustang. Link here for the video: https://youtu.be/1PA70pN6zPM

If I had a turbo on my engine I'm sure I'd have to cobble together a system and try this. I'm thinking it also would work great for cooling an engine for descending with power reduced. A cheap Arduino to monitor engine temperature and pump water when needed to cool the engine and the system becomes automatic.

Side note: I had a metal shop teacher in the 70's that had a turbo with water injection setup on his VW bug. It fascinated me that he could inject water to increase fuel economy. The same shop teacher built himself an impressive semi auto pistol. Teachers like that would never get hired now days. This was decades before automatic car starters were invented and this teacher took a wind up alarm clock and some switches and made a device to start his bug in the winter. He had a hard starting car so he set the gear train in the clock up to start his car every hour and run for 10 minutes. I loved this teacher.

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Posted

Note that it wasn't straight water injection on the 109, it was a Methanol/Water mix.  This is still done, and kits are available for cars:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkPFZWd8wj4

B52's used water injection during takeoff when loaded heavy.  They could only use it for a short time or it would cool the hot section too much and reduce the power instead of increase it.  Jet engines, particularly pure turbojets like the B-52, make thrust by shoving air/exhaust gases out the back really really fast.  Add water, which is much more dense AND expands much more than air when it converts to gas (steam), and you get a much higher thrust.  At least until the cooling effect sucks up too much energy and things quit expanding.

I did an aviation camp at the former Castle Air Force base in Merced, CA with my son one summer.  It was a former B-52 base, and they brought in some of the old B-52 pilots to talk about it.  They had a museum with a B-52 and a B-36 (what a monster!).  They also had an original B-52 simulator - it took up 3 rooms.  The Air Force had removed some boards so it would work, but the cockpit, flight engineer, and weapons officer stations (in 3 separate rooms) were all complete to look at, sit in the seats and make airplane noises.

Mark

 

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