Rolls-Royce Nene
| RB.41 Nene / J42 | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Rolls-Royce Nene on display at RAAF Base Pearce, Western Australia - note the wire mesh grille around the air intake to prevent Foreign object damage | |
| Type | Turbojet |
| Manufacturer | Rolls-Royce Limited |
| First run | 27 October 1944 |
| Major applications |
Canadair CT-133 Silver Star Dassault Ouragan de Havilland Vampire Grumman F9F Panther Hawker Sea Hawk |
| Number built | 1,139 (J42) |
| Developed into |
Rolls-Royce RB.44 Tay Pratt & Whitney J48 Klimov VK-1 |
The Rolls-Royce RB.41 Nene was a 1940s British centrifugal compressor turbojet engine. The Nene was a complete redesign, rather than a scaled-up Rolls-Royce Derwent with a design target of 5,000 lbf, making it the most powerful engine of its era. It was Rolls-Royce's third jet engine to enter production, and first ran less than 6 months from the start of design. It was named after the River Nene in keeping with the company's tradition of naming its early jet engines after rivers.
The design saw relatively little use in British aircraft designs, being passed over in favour of the axial-flow Avon that followed it. Its only widespread use in the UK was in the Hawker Sea Hawk and the Supermarine Attacker. In the US it was built under licence as the Pratt & Whitney J42, and it powered the Grumman F9F Panther. Its most widespread use was in the form of the Klimov VK-1, a reverse-engineered, modified and enlarged version which produced around 6,000lbs of thrust, and powered the famous Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15, a highly successful fighter aircraft which was built in vast numbers.
A more powerful slightly enlarged version of the Nene was produced as the Rolls-Royce Tay.
The Nene was designed and built as a result of an early 1944 Air Ministry request for an engine of 4,200 lb thrust, and an engine was schemed-out by Stanley Hooker and Adrian Lombard as the B.40. In the summer of 1944 Hooker visited the USA and discovered that General Electric already had two engine types, an axial and a centrifugal, of 4,000 lb thrust running. On returning to the UK Hooker decided to go for 5,000 lb of thrust and, working with Lombard, Pearson and Morley, a complete redesign of the B.40 resulted in the B.41, later to be called the Nene.
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