V12 engine needed to power SSC fuel pump

The first production V12 engine in a long time has been developed by MCT to take part in the recently set up Superleague Formula racing series. Made at its Leafield Technical Centre base in Oxfordshire, the 4.2litre engine delivers some 750bhp at 12,000rpm, not to mention an indistinguishable wail, to the delight of both drivers and race fans. "The original engine was sold on the power, the reliability and, of course the noise that a V12 makes was essential to the organisers," says Kevin Lee, managing director of MCT. "Nothing else sounds quite like a V12 as it goes down a straight." But, for Bloodhound its primary function is to power a fuel pump. Such is the magnitude of the challenge; the V12 will not actually provide any direct drive to the wheels. Instead it will run at an initial 5,000rpm to power all the electronic, hydraulic and ancillary systems such as steering and aerodynamic trim panels. Once the car reaches 350mph, the rocket will be fired. A fly-by-wire throttle system will trigger an instantaneous increase in revs and take the engine up to 12,000rpm. This will drive a fuel pump that will deliver pressurised Hydroxyl-Terminated Polybutadiene (HTP) at a rate of 50kg a second to the rocket engine core. The HTP will react with the solid synthetic rubber oxidiser in the rocket and provide an additional 25,000lbs of thrust. All in all, it consume around 1tonne of propellant in just 17 seconds. The V12 has been tested at the MCT site in conjunction with a similar pump using water to see if it could provide adequate flow rates. Only very minor adjustments had to be made to make it suitable. John Piper, head of design for the Bloodhound Project, says: "We needed to find an engine that was light and flexible - and able to deliver in excess of 700hp. We looked at various options, including turbine engines from the helicopter world but the state of the art MCT V12 won the day. At the moment, we're working with MCT at its Kidlington dynamometer facility, running characterisation work on the engine and pump combination." Many of the engineers at MCT were involved in the V12 engine development in the early 80's for Jaguars' XJS and, were able to bring a wealth of expertise and knowledge to the table to deliver a truly remarkable piece of engineering. But unlike the large and bulky V12 engines of yesteryear, the MCT engine is only 140kg and 700mm long, and is a far cry from the cumbersome V12s of the past. This has allowed it to be easily integrated into the Bloodhound chassis as it, along with its five litre fuel tank, can be tightly packaged. In terms of reliability, the engine has already proven itself during last seasons racing with just a few failures occurring. The engine uses a standard V12 cylinder arrangement, but by taking advantage of state of the art FEA and CAD tools, significant refinement and improvements could be made to reliability and durability to minimise the chance of a failure occurring. The clever part and innovation was the way the company used modern design tools to bring the engine to production in such a short time frame, just nine month from conception to build. "You do some basic hand calculations to work out bore spacing's, displacements and the like, and from that you get the basic layout and approximate performance of the engine," says Charlie Bamber, commercial director at MCT. "We used Lotus Engine Simulation Software to get the best balanced engine, the optimal valve train, piston and conrods. These are all FED'd with cost and optimisation constantly traded off. The top priority for us was that it has to be reliable."