Chrysler's New Engine

After nine years of experimenting, Chrysler Corp. last week demonstrated a gas-turbine engine for standard-model passenger cars, the first such engine in the U.S.* The engine, installed in a Plymouth coupe, is now being road-tested at Chrysler's 4,000-acre proving ground near Chelsea, Mich.

While gas turbines offer important advantages over piston engines (e.g., cheaper fuel, less vibration and fewer moving parts), they also gobble fuel greedily and generate terrific heat, notably from the exhaust. To solve both problems, Chrysler engineers devised a heat exchange that transfers heat from the exhaust gases to the incoming air. The system not only cools the exhaust but saves fuel, since the intake air is preheated before it reaches the combustion chamber. As a result, says Chrysler, the new engine delivers as many horsepower-miles per gallon of gasoline as a standard automobile engine, and the exhaust gases are several hundred degrees cooler. While cooling systems for automobile gas turbines had been designed before, they were too bulky to be practical. Chrysler's system is so compact that the whole engine weighs only 600 Ibs., 200 Ibs. less than a standard Plymouth engine.

Chrysler was careful to point out that a lot of problems have to be solved before the family car is turbine-powered. The efficiency of the turbine has to be stepped up, and cheaper substitutes have to be found for the scarce, expensive, heat-resistant alloys used in some of the parts. But Chrysler's George J. Huebner Jr., the engineer in charge of the turbine project, is hopeful of fast progress. Said he: "First we needed to get something as good as the piston engine. Now we've got it. and we'll go on from there."

* General Motors has a turbine car, the Firebird (TIME, Jan. 19), but its engine is not ready for installation in current auto bodies.

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