Electricity From An Old Aircraft APU

We attempt to use the alternator of Ian's Garrett GTCP85 APU to generate some electricity.....

[radio]

My neighbors are sooo lucky that I do not have access to such amazing toys. I would run them all day..

[djohnsto]

Perfect standby generator for modern suburbia.

[stevefrew]

I was building those APUs when Mr Garrett himself would walk thru the assembly area.

[barjan]

Those 3x3kW lamps brightened up my day! 😀

[UTuber]

World's loudest electricity generation right there. And your wife wouldn't need to run the hair dryer of it, just stand in front of it for a second

[elguapo]

9kVA is pretty common for aircraft generators, with the APU being driven directly at a constant speed with the frequency at a nominal 400Hz whilst the main engines obviously change rotational speed significantly so the gen is maintained at 400Hz using a Constant Speed Drive unit (CSD) on older aircraft or an Integrated Drive Generator (IDG). You're right about fuel types...you could probably run a gas turbine engine on sawdust or even flour if you could grind it down fine enough. You know what happens to flour mills when you get a spark!

[forrestallison]

Turbine power generators are actually pretty common around the world. They have the advantage that they can run on basically any fuel including gas and diesel. I'm curious, could this run on any fuel? Would that work?

hearing protection not optional

[GeorgeMCMLIX]

A sight to behold and music (albeit VERY loud!!) to my ears. Many happy years as an aircraft engineer playing with BAC 1-11 aircraft, including the RR Spey and GTCP85. Great video 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

[jcstudio]

if I were your neighbor I will bring my folding chair and watch you guys test that thing.

[philjjordan]

A 300 hp gas rurbine would put out at least 100, 000 watts. But it's main mission is to start the bigger engines on the plane using airflow as as a starter motor that make 12, 0000+ hp each

[MickeyMishra]

Running light bulbs has never been so much fun!

[esslar]

I've started many an APU, but never like this! If it weren't so loud, it would make a great backup home generator, I bet.

[chilebike]

I like the anti-theft device. No annotation on the control box whatsoever.

[rushymoto]

In a diesel generator an old rule of thumb is 1/2 pint per KVA per hour at full load for a fairly modern turbocharged diesel engine. I wonder what the consumption is with this? I ran lots of Cummins KTA 50 engines in the desert on JP8. We had 20X 50 liter 1250KVA units running in a synchronized plant in various locations.

[manuelalvarado]

Garrett AiResearch, who built that APU, was acquired by AlliedSignal and then merged with Honeywell.

[FliesFLL]

This particular APU looks like the thing they installed in the wheel well of a 727. Back in the day, I had a mechanic show me HOW to get the APU to run while the airplane was flying; This was an ultra ultra EMERGENCY procedure, because a running APU WOULD BURN THE TOP OF THE RIGHT WING ROOT. If you lost all your generators for some reason, you could pull down the APU panel, pull two wires off, and when connected, if the gear was down the APU would fire up. Again, an ULTRA EMERGENCY procedure and I certainly would NEVER NEVER tell a Fed/check airman about it CAN be done.

[melkiorwiseman]

It sounds very like the jet engines running the ambulance helicopter which used to land at a hospital almost next to where I used to reside for work purposes. One thing I noticed is that they would never just shut down the engines after landing. They always left the engines running for around two minutes following a landing before shutting the engines down. I presume this was to allow the cooling system to remove most of the heat before shutting them down completely. It's not difficult to imagine that the coolant and/or the lubricant would boil from the residual heat if they simply turned off the engines.

[casemodder]

i could picture myself firing that thing up in the garden for a load of dirty clothes and letting rip 2.5h 😂😂😂

[JG-hiby]

I wish I had one of these. Because I would actually legitimately use it for something. I’ve had this idea for an awesome long range RC boat for so long and one of those would be so amazing for it.😩

[clownhands]

Interesting that the whine of the turbine doesn’t vary at all when the 9 KW load is introduced.