PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Engine (shock) cooling what's the deal
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Old 27th August 2012 | 09:54
  #42 (permalink)  
TomNH
 
Joined: Sep 2010
Posts: 10
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From: London
Marine engines see use profiles much closer to aircraft engines than cars. Until relatively recently this wasn't too relevant as weight concerns weren't a major factor in the marine business so the engines didn't have much in common with aviation. For good safety reasons marine engines are almost all diesel except where power to weight was a major concern. Cooling can simply be managed through using a thermostat to dump the heat in the primary cooling circuit into the sea.

However this is changing: modern high performance, turbo and/or supercharged, diesels have appeared over the last decade or two. I've some experience with the steyr straight six monoblock engine that's got variants in the 2-300hp range. Our use profile is very demanding, flat out for ten mins or so then to idle and worst case to cold before starting again, and our problem was with shock heating (presumably 'cos the thermostat and liquid cooling smoothed out the cooling). We needed a steady supply of spare engines as we'd kill them regularly with only a couple of hundred hours on them, if that. Happily the boats are twins... Anyway the problem was massively reduced by running shore powered electrical block heaters. The primary cooling circuit is now kept at running temp and things are much happier. I read somewhere that the new six pot diesels being played with by Austro are based on a steyr engine.
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