The Tumansky M-88 was an air-cooled radial engine for aircraft developed in the Soviet Union shortly before World War II.

Design and development

The M-88 was designed to address the shortcomings of the

Tumansky M-87 The Tumansky M-87 was a Soviet air-cooled aircraft radial engine that was developed in the late 1930s. It was a development of their licensed Gnome-Rhone 14K engines that started with the M-85. Development In 1934, USSR licensed the French G ...

. The improvements incorporated in the M-88 were a strengthened crankcase, crankshaft, connecting rods, waffle ribbing at the piston bottom and a two speed geared centrifugal supercharger. The M-88 retained the same bore/stroke and displacement as the M-87 while increasing power to 1,000-1,150 hp. Design work began in 1937 and by 1939 the first prototypes were being flight tested in the

Polikarpov I-180 The Polikarpov I-180 (russian: И-180) was a 1938 Soviet Union, Soviet fighter aircraft, fighter prototype. It was the last attempt to extract performance from the basic Polikarpov I-16 design.Green 1973, p. 165. The development cycle was plagued ...

fighter prototypes. At first the M-88 was not a success, but the designers persisted and the M-88 was made into a reliable and widely produced engine. There were a number of different variants with the most numerous being the M-88B, of which 10,585 were produced at

Zaporozhye Zaporizhzhia ( uk, Запоріжжя) or Zaporozhye (russian: Запорожье) is a city in southeast Ukraine, situated on the banks of the Dnieper River. It is the administrative centre of Zaporizhzhia Oblast. Zaporizhzhia has a populatio ...

and

Omsk Omsk (; rus, Омск, p=omsk) is the administrative center and largest city of Omsk Oblast, Russia. It is situated in southwestern Siberia, and has a population of over 1.1 million. Omsk is the third largest city in Siberia after Novosibirsk ...

. The M-88B solved most of the mechanical failures associated with the M-87 and early M-88's by including oil injectors in the crankshaft, improved cooling and strengthened drive components. 16,087 M-88's were produced. In hindsight, the

Tumansky Sergei Konstantinovich Tumansky (russian: Серге́й Константинович Туманский; – 9 September 1973) was a designer of Soviet aircraft engines and the chief designer in the Tumansky Design Bureau, OKB-300. He worked i ...

family of engines developed from the

Gnome-Rhône 9K The Gnome-Rhône 9K Mistral was a nine-cylinder 550 hp (405 kW) to 700 hp air-cooled radial engine, that started life as an enlarged Gnome-Rhône 7K with two extra cylinders. Design and development The Gnome-Rhône 7K itself was a ...

and Gnome-Rhône 14K were far less successful than the

Shvetsov UEC-Aviadvigatel JSC (Russian: АО "ОДК-Авиадвигатель", lit. Aeroengine) is a Russian developer and builder of aircraft engines, most notably jet engines for commercial aircraft. Based at the Perm Engine Plant, its products powe ...

family of engines developed from the

Wright R-1820 The Wright R-1820 Cyclone 9 is an American radial engine developed by Curtiss-Wright, widely used on aircraft in the 1930s through 1950s. It was produced under license in France as the Hispano-Suiza 9V or Hispano-Wright 9V, and in the Soviet Uni ...

Applications

* Ilyushin Il-4 *

Neman R-10 The Kharkiv KhAI-5, (sometimes Neman R-10) was a Soviet reconnaissance and light bomber aircraft, designed in the mid-1930s in the Kharkiv Aviation Institute (KhAI, - in Ukrainian: ХАІ), under the direction of Iosif Grigorevich Nyeman (sometime ...

Sukhoi Su-2 The Sukhoi Su-2 (russian: Сухой Су-2) was a Soviet reconnaissance and light bomber aircraft used in the early stages of World War II. It was the first airplane designed by Pavel Sukhoi. The basic design received an engine and armament up ...

Specifications (Tumansky M-88B)

References

{{Tumansky aeroengines Aircraft air-cooled radial piston engines 1930s aircraft piston engines Tumansky aircraft engines

Design and development

Applications

Specifications (Tumansky M-88B)

See also

References