The Argus As 5 was a large 24-cylinder 6 blocks' star
aircraft engine, designed and built in Germany in the early 1920s by
Argus Motoren
''Argus Motoren'' was a German manufacturing firm known for their series of small inverted-V engines and the Argus As 014 pulsejet for the V-1 flying bomb.
History
Started in Berlin in 1906 as a subsidiary of Henri Jeannin's automobile busines ...
.
Design and development
Following the
Armistice of 1918, Germany continued to build aircraft and engines under the control of the
Military Inter-Allied Commission of Control
The term Military Inter-Allied Commission of Control was used in a series of peace treaties concluded after the First World War (1914–1918) between different countries. Each of these treaties was concluded between the Principal Allied and A ...
. For use on very large aircraft, Argus designed and built the As 5 WW-24 water-cooled piston engine.
The As 5 consisted of six banks of
cylinders arranged around a common
crankshaft with a single output shaft. Each cylinder drove the crankshaft through a master and slave big end, similar to most
radial engine
The radial engine is a reciprocating type internal combustion engine configuration in which the cylinders "radiate" outward from a central crankcase like the spokes of a wheel. It resembles a stylized star when viewed from the front, and is ...
s. The top and bottom sets of three cylinder banks were set at 45° to each other with a 90° separation between the outermost banks.
Individual cylinders with sheet metal water jackets shared the aluminium alloy heads, four to a bank. Inlet and exhaust valves were actuated by shaft driven
overhead camshaft
An overhead camshaft (OHC) engine is a piston engine where the camshaft is located in the cylinder head above the combustion chamber. This contrasts with earlier overhead valve engines (OHV), where the camshaft is located below the combustion cha ...
s. The aluminium alloy
crankcase was split top and bottom.
Although some testing was carried out, the As 5 never flew and was abandoned along with the very large aircraft projects it was intended to power.
Engines on display
A single example survives on display at the
Polish Aviation Museum
The Polish Aviation Museum ( pl, Muzeum Lotnictwa Polskiego w Krakowie) is a large museum of historic aircraft and aircraft engines in Kraków, Poland. It is located at the site of the no-longer functional Kraków-Rakowice-Czyżyny Ai ...
in
Kraków
Kraków (), or Cracow, is the second-largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in Lesser Poland Voivodeship, the city dates back to the seventh century. Kraków was the official capital of Poland until 1596 ...
,
Poland
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populou ...
.
Specifications
References
Further reading
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External links
Polish Aviation Museum - Argus As 5Enginehistory.org - Argus As 5
{{Argus aeroengines
As 5
1920s aircraft piston engines