page_title: Napier Nomad
section_title: Nomad II
hierarchical_section_title: Napier Nomad / Design and development / Nomad II
caption_attribution_description: English: The Napier Nomad compound engine at the National Air and Space Museum, United States.
context_page_description: The Napier Nomad was a British diesel aircraft engine designed and built by Napier & Son in 1949. They combined a piston engine with a turbine to recover energy from the exhaust and thereby improve fuel economy. Two versions were tested, the complex Nomad I which used two propellers, each driven by the mechanically independent stages, and the Nomad II, using the turbo-compound principle, coupled the two parts to drive a single propeller. The Nomad II had the lowest specific fuel consumption figures seen up to that time. Despite this the Nomad project was cancelled in 1955 having spent £5.1 million on development, as most interest had passed to turboprop designs.
context_section_description: Even before the Nomad I was running, its successor, the Nomad II (E.145) Nomad 6, had already been designed. In this version an extra stage was added to the axial compressor/supercharger, eliminating the separate centrifugal part and the intercooler. The turbine (which also received an additional stage) was now only used to drive the compressor, and feed back any excess power to the main shaft using a Beier variable-ratio gear; the separate propeller from the turbine was deleted, just as the whole of the "afterburner" system with its valves etc. So the system was now like a combination of a mechanical supercharger, and a turbocharger without any need for bypass. The result was smaller and considerably simpler: a single engine driving a single propeller. Overall about 1,000 lb (450 kg) was taken off the weight. The wet liners of the cylinders of the Nomad I were changed for dry liners.
  While the Nomad II was undergoing testing, a prototype Avro Shackleton was lent to Napier as a testbed. The engine proved bulky, like the Nomad I before it, and in the meantime several dummy engines were used on the Shackleton for various tests.
  A further development, the Nomad Nm.7, of 3,500 shp (2,600 kW) was announced in 1953.
  By 1954 interest in the Nomad was waning, and after the only project, the Avro Type 719 Shackleton IV, based on it was cancelled, work on the engine was ended in April 1955, after an expenditure of £5.1 million.
  A Nomad II is on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia.
caption: Front three-quarter view of a Nomad II
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