Chrysler Turbine Car

Chrysler Turbine Car

built a series of dedicated automotive gas turbines. There were at
least seven generations of Chrysler turbine engines designed, built,
and run, at a cost the company to this day will not disclose, but
certainly in the high tens of millions of non-adjusted dollars. None of
the company's designs saw commercial sale, and as far is as known only
one of the hundred or more engines ever left the ownership of the
company for a outside buyer. However the company indisputedly built
more turbine automobiles than any other company and in fact probably
more than all others put together. In addition, although the company's
stockholders never benefitted, aspects of Chrysler's technology did
enter commercial service on a very profitable basis.

To this day, Chrysler is remembered as the turbine car pioneer despite
being at best the third company to build one and despite the total
failure of Chrysler to market its technology for any application.
Primarily this is because unlike others who built only display
prototypes, Chrysler built 50 identical, uniquely designed test cars
and loaned them to various customers for a three-month trial period. At
the end of the trial, most of the cars were destroyed for semi-cogent
purposes, and only one was ever put on the market for open sale, when
the Bill Harrah car collection was largely liquidated.

The 50 test cars were coachbuilt to a very high standard by Ghia in
Italy and were styled by Elwood Engel, who was hired to replace the
fired Virgil "Excess" Exner. They were beautifully designed in the
'tapered' style found on the Engel-designed Ford Thunderbird and
contemporary Chryslers afterward. The front end had headlight bezels
styled to resemble turbojet engine inlet stators and the rear was a
copy of the fuselage aft center of the then obsolete, and
unsuccessful,Chance-Vought F7U Cutlass fighter. This design has been a
perennial favorite of plastic and diecast car modellers ever since.

The engine used in all the test cars was the fourth generation Chrysler
automotive gas turbine. It was a simple, productionable design using a
single stage centrifugal compressor (which looks for all the world to
be a scaled down Rolls-Royce Goblin section, and I suspect it is), a
single compressor (gasifier) turbine and single power turbine with
simple two-gear reduction, a single-can burner with a Champion igniter
fired by an automotive ignition coil, and a pair of Cercor regenerators
to provide thermal feedback to linearize the part-power fuel efficiency
in housings on the side of the engine. A single, substantially
oversized aircraft starter-generator was fitted, making hot starts or
hung starts most unlikely and depriving onlookers of the traditional
sturm und drang of turboshaft engine start sequences.

The engine could operate successfully on a variety of common fuels,
except leaded gasoline. Unfortunately, in 1963, leaded gasoline was
typically the only available common fuel at filling stations. Fuel
economy was not outstanding, but surprisingly not substantially worse
than many production cars of the day, and exhaust temperatures were
never a serious issue in terms of fire or damaging other vehicles or
pavement. In fact, at idle, it could be quite pleasant to stand behind
in cold weather as it would gently warm one's feet.

After the test period was concluded, most of the 50 production and 5
program prototype cars were dismantled and their bodies and frames
crushed. Several reasons were given, but ultimately it came down to the
basic kid's refusal to let anyone else play with one's own toys.
Afterward, the company built at least three more generations of turbine
engine, which were placed in modified production vehicles (as had the
first three generations of engine prototypes) often at the financing of
the EPA. It was certainly at least partially a corporate sop as the
Clean Air Act was a major contributor to the company's disinclination
to produce a turbine engine for sale: it had a great deal of trouble
meeting NOx limits and the R&D money was desperately needed to get the
conventional engines to comply. Ironically one of the stated purposes
of the Clean Air Act's draconian standards was to "force technology";
as is so often the case when technically ignorant legislators and
unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats wield power their efforts
backfired and made the conventional piston engine the only possible
alternative for the auto makers.

Sadly for automotive enthusiasts and Chrysler stockholders, Chrysler
never made a dime off their ill-fated Turbine Car effort. This is not
to say Chrysler's simple and small turbine engine concepts did not
prove successful and in fact immensely profitable. Sam Williams, the
number-two engineer under program czar George Huebner, left Chrysler to
found Williams Research, a Michigan company making very successful
small turbine engines for primarily military uses. Williams Research is
a privately held company which operates in unusually tight secrecy and
does not divulge any information regarding its products to those it
doesn't consider serious customers, and then usually under
nondisclosure: even the prices of its engines are unknown generally.
However, a copy of Jane's All The World's Aircraft will reveal a large
array of engines used in several military applications, most famously
the Tomahawk missile. It is generally conceded by everyone in the
aircraft engine industry that Williams Research is one of the most
profitable companies of its size in the industry. And there is little
question that a great deal of the core Williams technologies, such as
centrifugal injection investment casting of one piece turbine wheels,
were pioneered by Chrysler.

 

automotive gas turbine

Automotive gas turbines are a type of turboshaft engine specifically
designed for the purpose of roadgoing automobile or truck propulsion.
Although they have generally been considered an evolutionary dead end
and there is no major automotive company actively pursuing their
development, they are a fascinating area of technology for students of
both automobiles and of gas turbines in general.

Generally, automotive gas turbines differ from aircraft or
aeroderivative industrial engines in several ways which are common to
the needs both of the roadgoing automobile and to the varying market
conditions automobiles and turbine aircraft occupy in our world today.

Because aircraft gas turbines are sold in small quantities to
price-insensitive markets, they are generally built largely or wholly
of light, high energy metals fabricated pieces and often employ
intricate complex axial flow or compound compressor sections.
Automotive gas turbines almost invariably use single stage centrifugal
compressors and are built with structural components of aluminum or
iron castings. Therefore, they could be produced at drastically lower
costs at a small to moderate increase in weight for a given power. They
are also almost all of the free turbine or two-shaft type, where the
compressor and accessories are powered by a compressor turbine (or
gasifier in GM parlance) whereas the output-transmission, generator, or
propeller-is turned by a free spinning power turbine. (This is, for
aircraft mechanics, similar to the Pratt & Whitney PT-6 series as
oppoosed to the Rolls Royce Dart or Garrett AiResearch TPE-331.)

Straight gas turbine engines-those of simple or open cycle-are
generally efficient over a narrow envelope of engine speed, gas flow
and power output. This works well in helicopters (and race cars)
because they are always at high output, and in fixed wing aircraft
which can climb to altitude where the thin air results in lowered gas
flow and fuel burn for lower shaft output but higher true airspeed. In
a roadgoing auto or truck it would lead to extremely poor part-throttle
fuel consumption, as well as high exhaust gas temperatures which would
be a serious issue in city traffic.

Automotive gas turbines get around this by using thermal recuperation
or regeneration to transfer excess heat from the exhaust immediately
aft of the turbine wheels and put it back into the engine's air flow
between the diffuser and burner sections. Usually recuperation refers
to using a passive heat transfer system, such as an intercooler on a
turbocharged piston engine, whereas regeneration uses an active method
such as a Cercor porous wheel slowly rotated which is heated by the
exhaust and cools off in the diffuser airstream. This makes the engine
efficient over a wider power band and reduces total peak gas flow:many
engineers compare this to the use of negative feedback in electronic
amplifiers. Exhaust gas temperatures are also greatly reduced, as to
some extent noise is as well.

Another requirement of automotive engines not found in aircraft service
is engine braking. Automotive gas turbines provide engine braking in
one of two ways. General Motors designed its engines with a remotely
actuable overrunning clutch to link the separate gasifier and power
turbine sections of the engine. This allows the compressor to act as a
load when the vehicle is at high speed and no power is applied, and
also allows the engine to be "locked up" at cruising speed where the
engine acts as a single-shaft engine (like a 331 Garrett) for greater
cruise efficiency.

Chrysler and most other automotive developers eschewed the clutch
system in favor of a variable area turbine nozzle, analogious to the
two-pitch stators found in some automotive automatic transmisssion
torque converters, or to the petal engine nozzles of afterburning
turbojets-or a common garden nozzle. By varying the angle of a number
of airfoil-shaped blades around the turbine inlet, as a camera iris
diaphragm closes and opens, the pressure and flow to the power turbine
could be varied allowing for high torque at low rotor speed or actually
a negative torque when the rotor was at high speed. It was considered
much cheaper to implement and offered even more torque at high power
and low PT (power turbine) speeds, requiring fewer gears in the
transmission, although the engine braking was not comparable to the GM
technique.

Engine and accessory practice was generally similar to that on small
aircraft turboshaft engines, with starter-generators permanently
coupled to the power section, and like the earliest aircraft turbines
most used standard automotive oil products-ATF or SAE 30 motor oil-for
lubrication with wet sump systems. (This in fact led to substantial
coking issues in the first two generations of Chrysler engines.) Fuel
controllers were standard aircraft pieces (which even then cost more
than a new car engine: today, with the pretext of product liability,
these same controllers cost more than whole new cars-and, aviation
moving at a slothlike pace, are indeed still in production for the most
part!) and ignition was usually by AC or Champion igniters fired by
automotive or neon sign transformers. (Chrysler designed many of its
engines integrally with a modified TorqueFlite transmission,and the
engine and power steering gearbox were all lubricated from the
transmission gerotor pumps!)

For further information on this obscure but fascinating area of
technology, the best reference work is "The Gas Turbine Engine" by Jan
Norbye. It was published in 1973-by which time the turbine car engine
was almost an extinct notion to American automakers-and is probably the
most comprehensive source on the subject. There are also substantial
web resources which anyone may locate with any search engine with the
obvious criteria.

Is the turbine automotive powerplant concept totally extinct?
Commercially, yes. But with the availability of powerful CAD and
desktop manufacturing software, the increasing availability of CNC
multiaxis machining centers, and a powerful desire on the part of
enthusiasts to re-create a unique part of automotive history strongly
rooted in a very compelling point in time-the heyday of the turbine
car, as an idea, was the era of Kennedy, Monroe, and the Rat Pack with
their Dual-Ghias, after all-it's entirely possible someone will deign
to turn the pictures and drawings in these old books into sand-casting
patterns and centerless-ground shafts and Inconel blades. If a bunch of
determined Argintineans can build Grand Prix Bugattis from scratch,
it's certainly possible a Chrysler Turbine Car or a BRM-Rover engine
might once again breathe air-like the fictional dinosaurs in "Jurassic
Park".

Unfortunately, I wouldn't hold my breath, though....

 

This is *NOT* correct. Several of the gen4 turbine engines intended for
use in the 1963 Ghia-body Turbine Cars are in private or museum ownership.

False. The halo effect is quite real.

Not to mention the ripple effects from the techniques and technologies
developed as part of the Turbine Car program.

The purposes were cogent enough: Chrysler didn't want to pay importation
duties and taxes for fifty essentially unsaleable foreign-built cars. They
*tried* to find homes for more than just the ten that were saved. There
just weren't many takers.

Anyone got a figure on how much that car brought?

"Productionable" is not a word.

Horseshit. One and only one reason was ever given. It is above.

Incorrect; the gen7 engine in 1981 handily complied with *1989* emission
standards, including NOx. It was ||<---that close to series production;
one of the many conditions upon which the US Government's loan guarantees
to Chrysler were predicated was cessation and termination of the Turbine
Car program, which government bankers saw as a risky, pie-in-the-sky
folly.

All of this information is readily available from primarily Chrysler
documents; I'm not sure where your stuff came from.

DS

 

Not to mention that the practice of putting old helecopter turbines into ski
boats
is alive and well. I work with a guy that built one and runs it
semiregularly on
the river - needless to say when he fires it up, it sounds like a 747 taking
off.
It's not like building a turbine car would be that big of a challenge.

Ted

 

I remember the car well. Saw one in person as one of my dad's friends was a
test household.
Larry

 

Aside from Frank Kleptz can you name one running engine in _private_
hands?

Yeah, Williams Research.

It was advertised in the "Robb Report" in the mid-late 80s for $100K.
The ad did not mention the engine was gutted. Idiotpenis Domino's owner
Tom Monaghan bought it for $60K I seem to remember.

Like **** it isn't.

Nancy Sinatra would disagree-her daddy tried getting her one. In fact
Chrysler had hundreds of letters from people wanting one. Presumably
most weren't Siantras though.

 

Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:

Putting a runout junk aircraft turboshaft engine in a car is not too
challenging. Many have been done. The colossal fuel burn, noise,
exhaust heat, etc. means the fun usually wears off shortly and the car
gets parted out or sold to an even more gullible clown. Andy Granatelli
did this famously-he sold a Corvette to a dumb bunny for a six-figure
sum with one of his leftover unairworthy junk training engines he'd
wheedled out of P&WC in the sixties.

Turboprop and turboshaft engines have a core value as runouts that is
still higher than a new car, until that series of engine is no longer
wanted-usually because all the airframes that take it have been
upgraded to a higher dash number engine or junked, and the parts in the
engine are then of no value. PT6's are usually worth thirty or forty
grand now no matter what because the ST6 oil well and genset market
supports them, but Allison 250s are on the market cheap in the older
dash numbers. So are TPE-331 Garretts, but they are unusable for cars,
being single shaft engines.

Sooner or later one of these things will have a hot section failure in
public and the motor vehicle departments will ban gas turbines in cars
outright, as unelected bureaucrats do, and that will be the end of
that. The answer of course is blade containment, but the junk barons
can hardly be bothered.

 

How about all 9 survivors and their locations:

http://www.turbinecar.com/where.htm

Whether it isn't "like ****" or not, productionable is not a word.

From entering "productionable" in the search field of the
Merriam-Webster online dictionary, http://www.m-w.com/ :

The word you've entered isn't in the dictionary. Click on a spelling
suggestion below or try again using the search box to the right.

Suggestions for productionable:

1. productional
2. productions
3. preoccupations
4. predications
5. predictable
6. predoctoral
7. protectionist
8. protectionists
9. predaceousness
10. protectionisms


A real word that has the correct meaning is "producible."

 

Hmm - well there's lots of turbocharged cars out there, I would think
it would have to be a very specifically-written law with some wildly
interesting justifications to ban turbines in the engine yet permit them in
the exhaust stream.

Keep in mind also that turbines don't pass the emissions of todays
engines so your modded cars aren't street legal already, anyhow.

Ted