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Advantage: AvGas is heavily taxed in Europe. This is primarily an envy tax, because it brings in less than the cost of its administration, but the non-flying majority feels good by "punishing the mill …

First, piston engines are more efficient than turboprops, so their operational cost are lower. This also means that the system mass (engine plus fuel) for a trip is lower once you go beyond small rang …

You are comparing apples to oranges. Run your car engine at full throttle and measure again. The aircraft engine will look very good in comparison. Modern car engines optimise fuel consumption with …

Prop takeoff calculation is a bit tricky since so much changes between standstill and flight. The most important part is propeller efficiency $\eta_P$ which theoretically would become zero at rest if …

There are three factors which limit the possible speed of piston engines: Flame speed in the fuel-air mixture, relative speed of moving parts, here the pistons in their cylinders, and Valve inertia a …

Initially, all supercharging was done with, well, superchargers. Read NACA Technical Note 48 for a nice summary of German work on superchargers during WW I which reached the point of almost being read …

Disclaimer: I do not know if my answer is correct, but I think it is plausible. The Ki-61 engine was the Kawasaki Ha-40, a Japanese version of the Daimler-Benz DB 601 Aa turbocharged inverted-V inlin …

The BMW 801 had such a thing, essentially a mechanical/hydraulic analog computer which allowed to automatically adjust prop pitch, mixture, supercharger settings and ignition timing, all with a single …

No, stacking more propellers will reduce efficiency. The case with two is an exception because the second propeller benefits from operating in the slipstream of the first. In total, both propellers ac …

To add some more aspects to voretaq7's answer: Airplane engines have a very different operating point than car engines. This makes it impossible to simply plug a car engine into an aircraft. Aircra …

Power output of a reciprocating engine goes up with speed, and yes, maximum power is reached at maximum RPM. Considering the size and age of the Merlin 61 (27 liters displacement) it had a rather high …

I can think of two reasons: The efficiency of heat machines depends on the difference between lowest and highest temperature in the cycle, relative to the highest temperature, as formulated first by …

Feathering is only possible with variable pitch propellers and means that the blades are turned such that their mid-to-outer section is aligned with airflow and they create minimal air resistance. Thi …

You are right, there are few modern aerodiesels around - so few in fact that we can go through the brief list one by one: Thielert: This is a development based on Mercedes-Benz car diesels, of which …

Your reasoning is correct if engine mass is not important. Ships use huge engines, because increasing the number of cylinders beyond 8 will have diminishing returns in terms of smoothing out the torqu …