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Old 9th Jun 2012, 08:53
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peterh337
 
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This subject comes up regularly.

What "nobody" knows is how long a particular car engine would last when running at 100% power for 10-20 minutes solid (climb, turbocharged) and then run for hours at say 75% power.

These duty cycles are an order of magnitude harder than anything that happens in a car. At 100% power, your life expectancy on the road would be measured in minutes if not seconds

The average "quick" car (say 2000cc) can do about 130mph and at 85mph (UK motorway driving) is running at about 30-40% power.

Even rally cars can trash their engines in a few races, and that is still a much lower duty cycle than an aero engine.

For all their niggling faults and thermal management issues, the old Lycos have a decades-proven ability to run at 65%-75% power for ~ 2000 hours. Nobody has TMK put a dozen car engines on dynos and run them like that.

Even initial engine certification doesn't involve 2k hrs straight; I have forgotten the regime (an engine shop that does that sort of work explained it to me) but it is way short of 2k hrs' bench run.

Last edited by peterh337; 9th Jun 2012 at 08:54.
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