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New engines and CG issues

HAL Pilot

Well Known Member
Aloha All

Looking for some comments from engineer types.

There's some new engines that are in development like the Higgs diesel, Turb aero, and liquid piston. The trend on all of these engines is they are way lighter than the current crop from lycoming. For example a 210 HP Falcon FL 200 is 167 lbs. So how would one add close to 140 lbs to the nose of an airplane (RV-14 in my case) to stay in CG?

Heavy Battery or two

Heavy Starter

Air Conditioning ? I live in the desert.

Solid steel engine mounts bars vs tubes?

Heavy crush plate?

Bolt steel plate to Engine?

Bolt steel plate to firewall? Would make it bullet proof for those head on engagements ;-)

Heavier prop vs new Carbon fiber? (Least favorite)
 
Or...

Don't add more weight to compensate for a lighter engine; Move the engine farther forward to keep the design CG range of the wing/airframe.
 
The Liquid Piston design is many years away from powering your RV-14, if ever. It will be interesting to see how they solve the heat removal issues of this design...

The other two have possibilities once they accumulate many hundreds/ thousands of hours of flight time (not just dyno time) each without issues. Also years away from mainstream use given that requirement unless they get multiple engines flying on the test program from the get go.

You probably can't extend the nose and move the engine forward more than a few inches without destabilizing the airframe so it would require a combination of things you already thought of: heavy prop, batteries up front on the engine mount, rad up front with lots of coolant in the case of the Falcon, heavy crush plate etc.

Might end up with tail mods to gain back stability lost with the longer nose.
 
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