Examines the life of the remarkable, and controversial, F.W. Meredith, an individual who has largely been forgotten by history despite the brilliant advances he made which helped the Allies win the war against Hitler’s Third Reich.

By the mid-1930s the obstacles to high speed that aircraft designers faced included the question of cooling the engine. This was a big challenge that those working on the new fast aeroplanes entering service as the war clouds gathered over Europe had to consider, as the drag from the system increased as a square of the speed. Ducted systems were designed which lowered drag, but these were based on the assumption that the system was cold. This ignored the potential energy from the air, heated by the radiator, for liquid-cooled aircraft, and from the discharged engine exhaust gases.

It took a profoundly lateral thinker to harness the possibilities of the paradox that heat could cut the cost of cooling. That thinker was the British engineer Frederick William Meredith. A researcher at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough until 1938, F.W. Meredith a key player in the UK’s development of the autopilot and remote-controlled aircraft. His contribution to Allied success in the Second World War was enormous – but, incredibly, he was also a known a Soviet agent.

Few would doubt that the Supermarine Spitfire was a pioneering aeroplane – not because it was an all metal, monoplane with retractable undercarriage and enclosed cockpit as these were not unique – but because it was the first to incorporate a Meredith designed ducted cooling system. This was intended from the beginning to use heat to create ‘negative drag’. In practice the Spitfire’s design was flawed, as Meredith himself pointed out, and did not fully use what became known as the ‘Meredith Effect’.

Meredith also made entirely overlooked but extremely important contributions to resolving the problem of how to induce air smoothly into cooling ducts at high speeds without which, as the Spitfire demonstrated, ducted cooling systems worked sub-optimally.

The first aeroplane properly to exploit the ‘Meredith Effect’ was the North American P-51 Mustang, this being a very significant factor as to why it was 30mph faster than the Spitfire when both had the same Rolls-Royce Merlin engine.

This book by Peters Spring examines the life of the remarkable, and controversial, F.W. Meredith, an individual who has largely been forgotten by history despite the brilliant advances he made – advances which helped the Allies win the war against Hitler’s Third Reich.

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Table of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1: MEREDITH AND THE SPITFIRE
  • Chapter 1 Supermarine, Rolls-Royce and RAE – and the cooling challenge
  • Chapter 2 Royal Aircraft Establishment and Frederick William Meredith – Bolshevism rampant
  • Chapter 3 Meredith – papers on jet propulsion and duct entry
  • Chapter 4 Rolls-Royce and RAE – patents for ducted radiator systems
  • Chapter 5 Meredith and Capon ARC research papers on inline engine cooling
  • Chapter 6 RAE – research into heat and wind tunnel issues
  • Chapter 7 First aircraft with ducted radiators – Meredith critical of the Spitfire’s
  • Chapter 8 RAE – Spitfire and Hurricane wind tunnel tests
  • Chapter 9 Spitfire – a pioneering but flawed design
  • Chapter 10 Rolls-Royce buys Heinkel He 70 for flight testing, including radiators and exhaust stubs
  • Chapter 11 RAE – wind tunnel analysis in 1935 and 1936
  • Chapter 12 Ducted radiators on aircraft generally
  • Chapter 13 Meredith – scientific contribution post-1935
  • Chapter 14 Meredith – from Spitfire to spy
  • Chapter 15 Meredith – war years
  • Chapter 16 Meredith – post-1945
• PART 2: THE ‘MEREDITH EFFECT’ AND THE MUSTANG
  • Chapter 17 (1) Mustang and Meredith – the ‘Meredith effect’
  • Chapter 18 Meredith’s work – availability and impact in the US pre-1940
  • Chapter 19 ‘Meredith effect’ and US and non-US aircraft
  • Chapter 20 Stages in the evolution of the Mustang
  • Chapter 21 Atwood’s subsidiary Meredith claims re-examined
  • Chapter 22 Atwood’s overarching ‘Meredith effect’ claim re-examined
  • Chapter 23 (2) Mustang and Meredith – duct entry
  • Chapter 24 (3) Mustang and Meredith – exhaust gas momentum
  • Chapter 25 Mustang story completed
  • Chapter 26 Meredith and US ramjets
  • Chapter 27 Post-1941 national cooling systems
• Epilogue Meredith Reconsidered
• APPENDICES
  • Appendix 1 Cooling issues
  • Appendix 2 Development of cooling systems before the Spitfire
  • Appendix 3 ‘Meredith effect’ formula derivation
  • Appendix 4 RAE Wind tunnel Test Programme
  • Appendix 5 ‘Meredith effect’ meaning and first use
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Endnotes