Chrysler. And a lot of people who aren't familiar with the technology might not know this, but jet engines offer some big advantages over the typical piston engine. A jet engine 's got fewer moving parts; it weighs less; it spins, the internal parts spin rather than reciprocate, meaning that pistons go back and forth and cause an engine to shake or vibrate; a piston engine spins so therefore it's much smoother.
So, how do they work? This is a jet engine , specifically a turbofan engine. At the front is this giant fan.
Call out any guesses you have. Male Audience Member #4: Jet engine . Male Audience Member #5: Bees.
Well, if you look at the image on the screen, this right here is a bunch of guys standing around a car and the reason that this is a momentous moment, 1953, is that these gentlemen are lowering a jet engine into a car. And many people who've heard of the turbine car project know that Chrysler and GM and Ford all experimented with jet engines in cars for a period of time. But a lot of people
But the last time we saw, it was about 340,000 pounds. So the current suit is jet engine powered running diesel or jet fuel.
They couldn't do it, even incrementally. This original motivation was to design a jet engine for an airplane.
And the goes in and argues with the director about what the set should look like. So I've got a jet engine .
But like I said they were just here lowering an engine in a car, this would be 1953. So they did put the jet engine in the car and they took it out for a spin and they called up all the local press and said, "Come on out. Bring your news cameras, your reporters, your journalists." And of course that's the whole host of people you see in the left hand side of the screen there.
And so this is a car about 1961 or '62 and that's a jet engine under the hood and some of the items that go into a jet engine there, and I'll talk to you about that in just a second. And I'll, yeah, okay.
make these cars; mass produce 'em; put 'em on the road.'" And he said, "You would have had to build whole plants from the ground up because they didn't have the infrastructure to manufacture the internal parts of the jet engine ." And he said, That would have cost us about a billion dollars in 1970." And they didn't have a billion dollars. So this car, in front of the helicopter, is the last turbine car Chrysler built. That's 1978. And again, extremely advanced engine in this car; extremely efficient; extremely
And that's true for most metals. Yet, the first jet engine , dating back all the way to 1941, actually did use steel turbine blades. It was designed by British pilot and engineer Frank Whittle.
I mean, through the television show and this reporting, I mean, the thread that ties all this together is, yeah, I They were in Alameda in a 1950s-era jet engine test facility that was decrepit.
There are forces that fuel the object forward, that give it thrust. Things like gunpowder, a jet engine , or a pitcher's arm. But there are also forces that oppose forward progress, namely think gravity and wind resistance.
So essentially, it's a collection of little jet engines. They're not a million miles away from the kind of jet engine you get on a civil airliner or a jet fighter. You have, essentially, two on each arm.
- That's 1,200 degrees. - So the question is, why doesn't a jet engine just melt into a puddle? - We are right at the boundaries of the laws of physics - That is wild.
- We are right at the boundaries of the laws of physics - That is wild. It's at the same temperature now as it would be inside the jet engine . But here, they're liquid.
Well, that strength comes at a cost. - It's kind of at the same temperature now as it would be inside the jet engine . - Exactly.
Male Audience Member #5: Bees. Brian Dunning: Not bees, not a jet engine . Male Audience Member #6: Fan.
And many people who've heard of the turbine car project know that Chrysler and GM and Ford all experimented with jet engines in cars for a period of time. But a lot of people are not aware of the fact that Chrysler actually spent 25 years developing jet engine technology in the automotive field, and they actually got further along than anybody else did. So this a great occasion and I'll talk to you some more about some of the people in this photograph. On the far right is a man named George Huebner. He was the head of the
to shake or vibrate; a piston engine spins so therefore it's much smoother. But the important thing now that we look back on it and realize is a jet engine will burn on, run on anything that burns. So you can run a jet engine on not only on gasoline, but alcohol, kerosene, diesel, vegetable oil, peanut oil, Chanel No. 5, vodka, tequila, VO5 hairspray. They'd actually do demonstrates running the cars on these things.
Here's another one of the cars that has a turbine engine in it. Many of the early cars were simply other Chrysler products that they had shoe-horned a jet engine into. So again nothing on this car would tell you it's a jet engine except that it sounded different. So when this car drove by you it would sound like a low flying jet.
photographed near a turbine powered car. And so this is a car about 1961 or '62 and that's a jet engine under the hood and some of the items that go into a jet engine there, and I'll talk to you about that in just a
So this is one of those things that I like to point out; this is sheer irony. One of the ugliest cars ever built in Detroit and it's got a jet engine in it. That is an Aspen, the sister car of the Volare. And again Chrysler was, the engineers were still working on developing the engine, making it better and better and better.
Well, that strength comes at a cost. But wait, that's still 300 degrees less than the temperature inside a jet engine .
Well, that strength comes at a cost. - I am at Testbed 80, and they're about to fire up this jet engine and then throw dust into it.
engine, but a turbine engine, of course, uses huge quantities of air as well as pretty large quantities of fuel. And a lot of the noise you associate with a jet engine if you were to go walk along the tarmac at an airport, the sound you hear, half of the sound is coming from the front
peninsula because that was right dead center and he went around the edges for the most part. So he probably didn't even see it. But it's interesting 'cause it's named after him. they'd been working on jets since 1950. They put a jet engine in a car in 1953 and they finally decided that they had one that was so practical that anybody could drive it.
or raise the temperature in the combustion chamber. One problem with that, though, is that it turned the inside of a jet engine into one of the harshest environments we have ever built in which machinery has to survive.
They really determine how efficient you can make the engine because you can't make the engine so hot that the blades can't withstand that temperature. So they determine the maximum temperature of the combustion chamber, and therefore, the maximum efficiency you can realize with a jet engine . So what kind of metal could possibly survive these conditions?
Something that occurred to me is, why aren't they made out of tungsten? I mean, because tungsten doesn't melt until 3,400 degrees Celsius, which is more than twice the temperature inside a modern jet engine . But tungsten is also incredibly dense.
Well, that strength comes at a cost. Now. - So, what does the dust actually do inside a jet engine ?
We've been blessed with a purpose institute which our separate company from GSD&M now but we did all the way in our business. Roy Spence: I don't even know why I said that but it is so excited about the fact that we're not just in the jet engine business
them they're making the engines more and more efficient. Here's another one of the cars that has a turbine engine in it. Many of the early cars were simply other Chrysler products that they had shoe-horned a jet engine into. So again nothing on this car would tell you it's a jet engine except that it sounded different.
I actually, Chrysler put out a really nice book at the end of the program like, like a, I'm not sure what they did with it, but they put together a-a-a synopsis of the program. kinda cool. Male in audience: What's the performance of that compared to a normal car? You think a jet engine 's gonna have a lot of horse power. Is that, did they scale it way down so that