WI Brown and Boveri built jet engines for airplanes?

OTL in 1939, a gas turbine locomotive and gas turbine stationary generator were commissioned by the Swiss firm of Brown and Boveri.
1939 was the same year than Von Ohain flew his first jet engine, while in Britain, Frank Whittle was still struggling with his prototype jet engines.
Since B&B had subsidiaries in Germany, Britain and several other countries, they could sell engines to both sides during WW2, similar to Orlekon.

ATL: WI B&B perfected a turbo-prop engine (in the 2,000 hp range) and sold to the highest bidder?
 
There's a newspaper clipping with a photo of the thing on the aeroastro section of the mit website.

The sucker's huge. No way would it fit on a plane, in any useful sense.

Oh, you might be able to fit it into the fuselage of a 4 engine bomber, but certainly not on the wings.

4MW is like 5000hp or a bit more, which is a lot, but less than the existing 4 piston engines.

As a test rig? Maybe. Sell it to belligerents? Wrong design. Heck, they don't even seem to have been able to sell it as a generator.
 
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B&B were working with a potentially far more appropriate and applicable concept at that time, the free piston gas generator, capable of driving a (relatively) low temperature but high efficiency gas turbine. The gas generator was an opposed pair of two cycle Diesel pistons, self supercharged till there was no remaining power for shaftwork (no shaft for that matter). The high pressure exhaust (which, containing unconsumed oxygen, could support additional afterburning to boost energy content) drives the ouput turbine which, geared down to a slow turning bomber propeller, showed a HP specific fuel consumption (MIT/P&W PT-1) of less than 0.30 Lb/HP Hour. This all is based on B&B technology of the thirties and, unlike turbojets or turboprops, did not require any exotic material at all. Was a candidate for transatlantic bomber propulsion during WW2. Scattered components still at WPAFB in fifties.

Dynasoar
 
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