Daimler-Benz DB-601 variable speed supercharger fluid drive coupling.
The device is quite clever, and is a type of Föttinger coupling. You essentially change the gearing by varying how much oil is inside, but it is really a variable "slip" coupling, since it cannot raise the gear ratio, therefore it is combined with a step-up gear.
It had three main technical shortcomings:
1) It introduces a lot of heat into the oil except for when it is full, and near 1:1 gearing. Essentially the more you "slip" it, the more heat goes into the oil.
2) The oil can get very hot inside, if your oil is of poor quality, it tends to sludge and block up the oil galleries inside.
3) For practical reasons, the slip you can achive is limited to about 35%,
However, it has the following advantages:
1) Up to 10% power gain at take off, due to the almost total elimination of throttling losses you endure with a geared supercharger (which get less the more gears you have).
2) Quite high power density, you can transmit a lot of power in quite a small coupling.
3) Despite looking "tricky" it actually has only two moving parts.
Finally, the disadvantages are moderated by the following aspects:
1) Once you are at high altitude, the coupling is operating at minimum slip, and hence generates no appreciable heat. Since the heat is principally generated during climb on an operational standpoint, when the engine is anyway starting from cold, it may not necessarily require that you fit a very large oil radiator to compensate.
2) With better oils this is managable (the Germans had to make use of quite substandard aero-engine oils for much of the war).
3) Supercharger gearing tends to be fairly narrow, and the 35% slip is actually all that is needed except for very extreme cirumstances.
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Rolls-Royce engineers thought it very clever, and didnt much like their existing supercharger gearbox, which was a French patent by the Farman company, which needed royalties to be paid.
Geoffrey Wilde and Stanley Hooker visited the Sinclair Drives company to look at designing a similar system for the Merlin, but the Battle of Britain arrived in the middle of their discussions and all talk of major changes to the Merlin vanished instantly.
This type of coupling found use in American aero engines where it was used as a gearbox on the turbocompound radial to vary the speed between the power recovery turbines and the crankshaft.
Whilst it appears to be the same as a car automatic transmission (a torque converter), there are a number of detail design differences, as the torque converter has to operate over a higher range of speed "gearings", and so has more complex geometry, is larger, and typically has lower efficiencies as a compromise.