TSIO 360 leaning questions.

[Old Akro]

Thanks Walter

I'm just reading the proceedings of a symposium on piston aircraft engines from 1976. Both CMI & Lycoming did work with 80% power climbs at best power mixture settings. This regime seemed to work well, but tHeir main concern seems to be that cooling airflow is not reliably good enough. Specifically to the TSIO 360 that I'm interested in Continenta says that the engine needs 5.5 inches of water pressure drop across the engine rather than the common 4 or less.

This work seems to have been in response to a NASA sponsored project to look at emissions. More power to NASA!

The frustrating thing, us that it looks like the engineers at both Continental & Lycoming knew what to do to improve the engines, but it never happened.

I presume the product liability crisis and FAA regulatatory compliance made it too hard / too expensive.

I was also interested in another paper which experimented with what it called a " dog house" or air box which fitted on top of the engine to do away with baffles. This seems to be an outstanding idea and I'm surprised it hasn't been more widely adopted - or even that someone hasn't STC'd something.

They were also doing work on better injectors. Another paper has in service photos of injector " spray" patterns of a range of injectors. The CMI injectors really are just a dribble. In the seventies, they had a plan to make it better. But 40 years later nothing has happened.

Really, we run aircraft engines sub optimally because of either cooling limitations or cylinder to cylinder mixture variations. Both of which could be fixed easily if the regulatory environment allowed it.