Originally Posted by
rickair7777
High performance piston engines would need TEL or some other octane booster.
Jet engines could plausibly evolve from the turbo chargers used to boost piston engine performance. Add a combustion chamber to a turbo charger (and an afterburner if you want to go all out). In fact early jets bore a resemblance to turbo chargers, so there is likely some basis in fact to that.
Hi Rick.
I'm not sure that this is right.
While plausible, I don't think that WWII metallurgy was up to the challenge of turbochargers. I believe (but agree that I may be wrong) that WWII planes all had superchargers (either gear driven or belt driven) rather than turbochargers.
The first operational jet engine was developed in Germany during WWII, and many of the initial engines had the turbine blades melt during operation. My understanding is that high performance piston engines of the period had higher exhaust gas temperatures than these early jets.
My understanding is that the first piston engine turbines were used, in the late 1940s, early 1950s, for turbo compound engines, such as the DC-6, where a supercharged engine used the exhaust gas to drive a turbine that transferred power to the propeller.
So possibly the turbocharger was an outgrowth of the jet engine.
Joe