Rolls Royce Nimbus

Below can bee seen some pictures of a Nimbus turbo shaft converted into a turbo
jet by the separation of the gas generator from the rest of the engine, however
the engine itself looked a little rough. So while it was apart to do a few things
I gave it a once over, an internal clean up and external restoration.

The cell below was built for investigating the suitability of different fuels to
be run in small gas turbines. The Nimbus has centrifugal fuel injection and
thus no high pressure fuel system at all and this is an excellent system for
burning rubbish fuel. In the cell I installed three different fuel systems that were
all able to be interconnected in different ways with selections at the control
consol. One of the fuel systems was normal kerosene or diesel, one had a
macerator in it and an agitator to try fuel containing light fats and solid plant
material, the other had a very powerful heater and pumps along with trace
heated pipes for running heavy fuels like tallow and palm oil (which is solid
below 25-30 degrees)

The most severe fuel that I succeeded in running was Tallow (rendered
animal carcasses). It ran fine when it was heated to 90'c with no smoke or
smell. It did however dissolve my magnesium filter bowl after a while which
was a pain as the entrained airflow through the cell covered everything in
quickly solidifying smelly glue...

Don't let the covers on the test cell intake and exhaust fool you..
the tops and reducers were only on as weather covers when not running

Half way through my build I decided to turn the engine around
and add servo hp cock and throttle controls.

As test cell aerodynamics do not have to be far out to be completely wrong
and trial and error will simply not succeed, I decided to go for a sealed
exhaust. I controlled the airflow in the cell with variable louvred apertures.
After a few hours messing around with it I managed to keep the air in
the cell below 25'c with the cell remaining at just below atmospheric pressure.

 

 

 

 

 

Turbomeca
Marbore II

Turbomeca
Palas

Original Turbomeca Palouste

Rolls-Royce
/Blackburn
Palouste

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