The Diemech TP 100 is an American

turboprop A turboprop is a Gas turbine, gas turbine engine that drives an aircraft Propeller (aeronautics), propeller. A turboprop consists of an intake, reduction drive, reduction gearbox, gas compressor, compressor, combustor, turbine, and a propellin ...

and

turboshaft A turboshaft engine is a form of gas turbine that is optimized to produce shaft horsepower rather than jet thrust. In concept, turboshaft engines are very similar to turbojets, with additional turbine expansion to extract heat energy from the ex ...

aircraft engine An aircraft engine, often referred to as an aero engine, is the power component of an aircraft propulsion system. Aircraft using power components are referred to as powered flight. Most aircraft engines are either piston engines or gas turbin ...

that was under development by Diemech Turbine Solutions of

DeLand, Florida DeLand is a city in and the county seat of Volusia County, Florida, United States. The city sits approximately north of the central business district of Orlando, and approximately west of the central business district of Daytona Beach. It is ...

in 2012. By June 2017 the company website had been taken down and it is likely that the company is out of business and engine development cancelled.

Design and development

The TP 100 was developed from an engine developed by

PBS Velká Bíteš První brněnská strojírna Velká Bíteš, a. s. ("First Brno Engineering Plant", known as PBS VB) is a Czech Republic, Czech engineering and manufacturing company. It focuses mainly on the development, testing, and production of devices for t ...

of the

Czech Republic The Czech Republic, also known as Czechia, and historically known as Bohemia, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the south ...

for use in

UAV An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or unmanned aircraft system (UAS), commonly known as a drone, is an aircraft with no human pilot, crew, or passengers onboard, but rather is controlled remotely or is autonomous.De Gruyter Handbook of Drone ...

s. The design goal was to provide an engine that could run on globally available fuels, such as

Jet-A Jet fuel or aviation turbine fuel (ATF, also abbreviated avtur) is a type of aviation fuel designed for use in aircraft powered by gas-turbine engines. It is colorless to straw-colored in appearance. The most commonly used fuels for commercial ...

ultra-low-sulfur diesel Ultra-low-sulfur diesel (ULSD) is diesel fuel with substantially lowered sulfur content. Since 2006, almost all of the petroleum-based diesel fuel available in Europe and North America has been of a ULSD type. The move to lower sulfur content all ...

, given the disappearance of

avgas Avgas (aviation gasoline, also known as aviation spirit in the United Kingdom, UK) is an aviation fuel used in aircraft with spark-ignited internal combustion engines. ''Avgas'' is distinguished from conventional gasoline (petrol) used in moto ...

in most parts of the world. The TP 100 develops and weighs plus accessories. The engine was expected to produce a specific fuel consumption of 0.82 lb/hph (0.5 kg/kWh), yielding a cruise fuel flow of per hour which would have been 52% more than the equivalent piston engine, the

Lycoming IO-540 The Lycoming O-540 is a family of air-cooled six-cylinder, horizontally opposed fixed-wing aircraft and helicopter engines of displacement, manufactured by Lycoming Engines. The engine is a six-cylinder version of the four-cylinder Lycoming O-3 ...

, which produces the same power at a SFC of 0.45, burning per hour. In examining these numbers AVweb editor Paul Bertorelli stated that this "illuminates the harsh fact that turbine engines just aren't as efficient as piston engines and the smaller the turbines are, the less efficient they are". The company had planned to work with PBS to obtain

Federal Aviation Administration The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is a Federal government of the United States, U.S. federal government agency within the United States Department of Transportation, U.S. Department of Transportation that regulates civil aviation in t ...

certification Certification is part of testing, inspection and certification and the provision by an independent body of written assurance (a certificate) that the product, service or system in question meets specific requirements. It is the formal attestatio ...

in the US. The engine was expected to fly first in mid-2013 on a

Van's Aircraft RV-10 The Van's Aircraft RV-10 is a four-seat, single-engine, low-wing homebuilt airplane sold in kit form by Van's Aircraft. It is the first four-seat airplane in the popular RV series.Vandermeullen, Richard: ''2011 Kit Aircraft Buyer's Guide'' ...

testbed, but development ended before the engine was flown. By 2022 PBS Velká Bíteš was offering the TP 100 for sale as the non-certified PBS TP100 Turboprop Engine "for small aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles".

Specifications (TP 100)

References

{{Reflist

External links

Official website archive
on

Archive.org The Internet Archive is an American non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including websites, software applic ...

2010s turboprop engines