Bristol Titan
family of radial piston aircraft engines
The Bristol Titan was a British five-cylinder air-cooled radial engine, designed and built by the Bristol Aeroplane Company in the late 1920s. It had the same size cylinders as the earlier Bristol Mercury engine of 5.75 in × 6.5 in (146 mm × 165 mm) (displacing 844 cu in (13.83 L)) and produced between 200–240 hp (150–180 kW). Later versions of the Bristol Titan also used a Farman-style reduction gear produced by Gnome-Rhône.
Design and development
The engine was designed as a five-cylinder radial, to use as many parts of the Bristol Jupiter as possible. Cylinders, pistons, articulated connecting rods, crankshaft and other minor parts were interchangeable with the Jupiter.
The major significance of the Titan was that it was licensed to Gnome-Rhône and became the pattern for the Gnome-Rhône 5B and 5K. In 1927, Gnome-Rhône was looking for ways out of its licence agreement with Bristol for the Jupiter engine of 1920 and began to produce the Gnome-Rhône 5B and 5K without royalties.
Gnome-Rhône was not satisfied with producing Bristol designs under licence, and started a major design effort based around the mechanics of the Titan engine. The results were introduced in 1927 as the K-series, spanning the 260 hp (190 kW) Gnome-Rhône 5K Titan, the seven-cylinder 370 hp (280 kW) Gnome-Rhône 7K Titan Major, and the nine-cylinder 550 hp (410 kW) Gnome-Rhône 9K Mistral. As a result, Gnome-Rhône ended royalty payments to Bristol, and the Gnome-Rhône 5K were built in much greater numbers than the original Bristol Titan. By 1930 they had delivered 6,000 Jupiters, Mistrals and Titans, making them the largest engine company in France.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bristol Titan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.