UTMC

Saw these over at another board. Christ this thing's huge:







The Wartsila-Sulzer RTA96-C turbocharged two-stroke diesel engine is the most powerful and most efficient prime-mover in the world today. The Aioi Works of Japan's Diesel United, Ltd built the first engines and is where some of these pictures were taken. It is available in 6 through 14 cylinder versions, all are inline engines. These engines were designed primarily for very large container ships. Ship owners like a single engine/single propeller design and the new generation of larger container ships needed a bigger engine to propel them. The cylinder bore is just under 38" and the stroke is just over 98". Each cylinder displaces 111,143 cubic inches (1820 liters) and produces 7780 horsepower. Total displacement comes out to 1,556,002 cubic inches (25,480 liters) for the fourteen cylinder version.



Some more facts on the 14 cylinder version:
Total engine weight: 2300 tons (The crankshaft alone weighs 300 tons).
Length: 89 feet
Height: 44 feet
Maximum power: 108,920 hp at 102 rpm
Maximum torque: 5,608,312 lb/ft at 102rpm

Fuel consumption at maximum power is 0.278 lbs per hp per hour (Brake Specific Fuel Consumption). Fuel consumption at maximum economy is 0.260 lbs/hp/hour. At maximum economy the engine exceeds 50% thermal efficiency. That is, more than 50% of the energy in the fuel in converted to motion. For comparison, most automotive and small aircraft engines have BSFC figures in the 0.40-0.60 lbs/hp/hr range and 25-30% thermal efficiency range. Even at its most efficient power setting, the big 14 consumes 1,660 gallons of heavy fuel oil per hour.

And that's how Wal-Mart gets its stuff!

Needs a bigger cam.

Edit: I'm retarded, and my quick attempt at being snarky has failed.
I realize now that I'm looking at a crankshaft.

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Yowza.

I was reading about this engine awhile back. They say that the foremost limiting factor in reciprocating engine design is piston speed. This engine's piston speed is comparable to piston speed in an F1 car's engine. I thought that was fascinating. I think that at least as interesting as this engine itself is to think of all of the tooling, and foundry work that goes into it. I can't imagine how much money went into a project like this.

I tried to copy another link and it won't work for some reason but in it they state the piston speed at 18 mph. But considering the scale of the thing yeah I suppose it's comparable to the F1. The pistons have oil rods going through them to cool the underside of the piston; the rod and everything is about 24 feet long IIRC. I'll try the link again later...

Yeah, those are big.

Also, while they are Diesel-cycle engines, don't be fooled into thinking they rund into anything resembling what your friendly petrol station attendant refers to as "Diesel".

They run on "heavy fuel oil", the black evil that remains at the bottom of the refinery distillation stacks, seriously dirty shit, and they don't have emissions controls (it's a two smoke, remember?).

One such boat blasts as much pollutants into the air (not considering greenhouse gases, but sulphur oxides and other shit) as 50 million cars. 50 million.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... -pollution

Coincidentally, despite being two-stroke engines, these big fuckers do have camshafts. They need an exhaust valve for the turbo to work.

This is for a Wartsila engine, though probably not that particular one:

Now we stuff that into a Dyna-Glide chassis, put some ape-hangers on it, and color it OCC.

Yeah, that heavy fuel oil is nasty shit.
A few years ago, a container ship smacked into the SF bay bridge, and tore a big fat hole in its fuel storage compartment, dumping some 50k gallons of the stuff into the bay.
I had recently moved away from a place on Treasure Island (which sits smack in the middle of the bay) and heard from my ex roommates that they couldn't go home for several days because the fumes were so awful that they made everyone sick.
Apparently, by the time they'd be finished packing a bag, or watering the plants, they'd be dizzy and about ready to throw up.

I like sailboats.

piccini9 wrote:I like sailboats.

Then you'll love the Wartsilla's new foe, the SkySail. Intended to help large ships save fuel.



http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -kite.html

I suppose you could save fuel this way, too. That's like, 30 of those ridiculous parafoil thingies.

I suppose the best way to save fuel on maritime shipping would be to get the bloody manufacturing revolution off the ground and stop shifting components and sub-assemblies halfway around the world and finished products from one end to the world to another.

Sisyphus wrote:

I suppose you could save fuel this way, too. That's like, 30 of those ridiculous parafoil thingies.

I'll see your Preußen and raise you a Thomas W. Lawson.

At a cost of approximately $250,000, the Thomas W. Lawson holds the record of being the only seven-masted schooner, the only seven-masted sailing ship in modern time (see Zheng He's Treasure Ships), the largest schooner, and the largest pure sailing vessel, in terms of tonnage, ever built. Her design and purpose was an ultimately unsuccessful bid to keep sailing ships competitive with the steam ships that were becoming more common for freight transport purposes. However the ship's underwater hull was too large and its sail area was too small for good sailing properties, and a reduced load capacity from 11,000 to 7,400 long tons (see below) made working to capacity impossible, and cut the expected profits.

DerGolgo wrote:I suppose the best way to save fuel on maritime shipping would be to get the bloody manufacturing revolution off the ground and stop shifting components and sub-assemblies halfway around the world and finished products from one end to the world to another.

I'm with you on that. Consider the size, weight, complexity and price of these big engines. Imagine a macro-manufacturing lab of equivalent price and space footprint. So much could be accomplished without burning fuel to move crap around the world. Keep crap local! Make crap local! Crap Locally! Ok the marketing end needs some spin.

Pattio wrote:

DerGolgo wrote:I suppose the best way to save fuel on maritime shipping would be to get the bloody manufacturing revolution off the ground and stop shifting components and sub-assemblies halfway around the world and finished products from one end to the world to another.

I'm with you on that. Consider the size, weight, complexity and price of these big engines. Imagine a macro-manufacturing lab of equivalent price and space footprint. So much could be accomplished without burning fuel to move crap around the world. Keep crap local! Make crap local! Crap Locally! Ok the marketing end needs some spin.

I'm all for that. Heck, at my house we buy as much local as humanly possible. Sometimes we barter for things.

And GG, your Lawson is no good. There's a reason they only built one of them. She proved impossible to tack, which became her undoing. I think she was only around for a couple years before she was wrecked.
Commercial square rig was however profitable right up to the 30's and some might argue well into WWII. When you consider that a vessel like Pruessen was sailed with less than twenty men, and a modern tankship or container vessel is sailed with about the same, once someone can figure out how to make it profitable again it will happen. It's a stretch, I know, but hope springs eternal.
You can save a lot of pollution and fossil fuel at the cost of someone's convenience but in the end that's the payoff.

Sorry about the threadjackery. Ginormous motors are really cool as "things unto themselves" but the ships, and all the crap that is shipped in them brings to mind thoughts like, "Really?" and "Why?"

Now I'm gonna put on my Birkenstocks and go turn over the compost heap.*








* Not really.

piccini9 wrote:Now I'm gonna put on my Birkenstocks and go turn over the compost heap.*








* Not really.

So, are you going to turn the heap barefoot, or just walk around with the 'stocks? I don't understand. Much confused.

Sisyphus wrote:I tried to copy another link and it won't work for some reason but in it they state the piston speed at 18 mph. But considering the scale of the thing yeah I suppose it's comparable to the F1. The pistons have oil rods going through them to cool the underside of the piston; the rod and everything is about 24 feet long IIRC. I'll try the link again later...

I did a bit of quick math to figure out what the piston speed would be for a 98" stroke at 102rpm and got 18.9 mph. Then I figured out what it would be for the RD's engine 54mm stroke @10000rpm. For that I got 40.26 mph. Clearly what I had read about relative piston speeds was way off. The way I figured speeds would give the average piston speed throughout the revolution, not max speed (when the piston crank is traveling through the 3 o'clock or 9 o'clock positions). I'm not sure how I would figure that out, but at any rate I think figuring the averages out is proof enough to show that piston speeds in this big diesel are not in any way comparable to F1 engines, as I had read somewhere. I guess there's a lesson in here about quoting what one reads!

Don't you have to know the base circle of the crank or somethig to get piston speed?

"Comparable to an F1" means at scale. I think if you scale up an F1 engine you get 18 mph at 3/9 o'clock. I could be wrong about this but then so could the guys who wrote it in the first place.

The 2 stroke diesel is not as dirty as a conventional one, fuel only gets injected after exhaust valve is closed. I have seen several of them, smaller ones called Detroit Diesel are fairly comon. Also been inside one of the larger ones, my friend is a captain and while his ship was docked in Providence some years back he invited us on board and we got a tour of engine room, I also scored a souvenir, an old exhaust valve that is several feet tall.

Sisyphus wrote:Don't you have to know the base circle of the crank or somethig to get piston speed?

"Comparable to an F1" means at scale. I think if you scale up an F1 engine you get 18 mph at 3/9 o'clock. I could be wrong about this but then so could the guys who wrote it in the first place.

The base circle would be the same as the stroke. I got the numbers by figuring that the piston travels twice the stroke, (because it goes up and down in one rev) multiply that by RPM and figure that is how far the piston travels in one minute. Then just multiply up to make that into MPH. A statute mile is 5280 ft, right?

As far as the whole two-stroke issue, as I'm sure many of you know, a two stroke diesel works totally different from a two stroke gasoline engine(bless their hearts!). Two stroke Detroits are a thing of the past. They're great engines, but they don't meet emissions requirements. They will be around for a long time to come as people keep rebuilding them, but you can't buy a new one.

I had (command of) a boat with two Detroit 12/71's and it seemed like both of them were bound to see the bottom of the sea and they were going to take me with them. One of them hemmoraged oil so badly and neither could be shut down after 24 hours of running for fear that they would not restart. The other one smoked out the open breather so bad you couldn't be in the engine room for more than a few minutes at a time!
For all the lack of pollution they didn't put out through the exhaust, it was definitely put into the environment in the form of oily bilge water (yes, I know, I know but it was either sink or pump out)! Detroits definitely have a well deserved reputation for being hard to kill. I had another boat that had broken a timing cover and bled oil all over the place but by the time the low oil alarm went off we were back alongside but it had NO oil in it.
Amazing engines. Love 'em.

My Little Pony wrote:The base circle would be the same as the stroke. I got the numbers by figuring that the piston travels twice the stroke, (because it goes up and down in one rev) multiply that by RPM and figure that is how far the piston travels in one minute. Then just multiply up to make that into MPH. A statute mile is 5280 ft, right?

Oooh, okay. I think statute mile is 5820 but yeah, I get it.

alright you math-heads, I have to put this to rest now, piston travels at it's max velocity at 3 and 9 o'clock with the same speed as the big end of the rod, big end travels with a constant velocity in a circle diameter of which is a stroke of just over 89", makes the perimeter of the circle about 280" (D x Pi) At 102 rpm it rotates 6120 times and hour traveling 1713600" or about 27 miles in one hour.

Fastest turning F1 motors were 2006 spec motors peaking at 20,000 rpm, in 2007 same motors were limited to 19K and then 18K rpm which remains to this day. Minimum stroke which is desired to achieve high rpm and slower piston speeds is 39.7mm due to a max bore spec of 98mm, applying same math piston travels about 150 km/h or about 93.5 mph at 20,000 rpm, or about 84 mph for 2010 spec of 18,000 rpm, which is not that fast, but if you consider that it changes direction twice per revolution, 36,000 times a minute (600 times per second) the acceleration/deceleration load it experiences is simply unimaginable, however I'm sure the engineers have calculated it and took it in to account when they designed these motors to last 2000 miles required by 2010 engine regulations.

Sisyphus wrote:

My Little Pony wrote:The base circle would be the same as the stroke. I got the numbers by figuring that the piston travels twice the stroke, (because it goes up and down in one rev) multiply that by RPM and figure that is how far the piston travels in one minute. Then just multiply up to make that into MPH. A statute mile is 5280 ft, right?

Oooh, okay. I think statute mile is 5820 but yeah, I get it.

You aren't from Denver.

MATPOC wrote:alright you math-heads, I have to put this to rest now, piston travels at it's max velocity at 3 and 9 o'clock with the same speed as the big end of the rod, big end travels with a constant velocity in a circle diameter of which is a stroke of just over 89", makes the perimeter of the circle about 280" (D x Pi) At 102 rpm it rotates 6120 times and hour traveling 1713600" or about 27 miles in one hour.

Fastest turning F1 motors were 2006 spec motors peaking at 20,000 rpm, in 2007 same motors were limited to 19K and then 18K rpm which remains to this day. Minimum stroke which is desired to achieve high rpm and slower piston speeds is 39.7mm due to a max bore spec of 98mm, applying same math piston travels about 150 km/h or about 93.5 mph at 20,000 rpm, or about 84 mph for 2010 spec of 18,000 rpm, which is not that fast, but if you consider that it changes direction twice per revolution, 36,000 times a minute (600 times per second) the acceleration/deceleration load it experiences is simply unimaginable, however I'm sure the engineers have calculated it and took it in to account when they designed these motors to last 2000 miles required by 2010 engine regulations.

Thanks you. Funny how simple it is that piston speed at 3 an 9 is the same as the big end bearing speed, and I couldn't see that. Simple. Duh.

WeAintFoundShit wrote:

Sisyphus wrote:

My Little Pony wrote:The base circle would be the same as the stroke. I got the numbers by figuring that the piston travels twice the stroke, (because it goes up and down in one rev) multiply that by RPM and figure that is how far the piston travels in one minute. Then just multiply up to make that into MPH. A statute mile is 5280 ft, right?

Oooh, okay. I think statute mile is 5820 but yeah, I get it.

You aren't from Denver.

D'oh! I don't know what I was thinking. Been to Denver once and I actually got altitude sickness. I do much better at sea level.

Decided to take it one step further and calculate the G force on the piston,

wiki says:

An acceleration of 1 g equates to a rate of change in velocity of approximately 35 kilometres per hour (22 mph) for each second that elapses

so if piston accelerates from dead stop to it's max velocity and back to dead stop twice per revolution that is 4 load cycles per revolution, at 18,000 rpm it's 1200 per second or once in 1/1200th of a second it reaches 150kph, by my calculation it experiences 5140 G's! can it be right? This would be the F1 engine, not the Megazilla boat motor.

Google found me this: http://2.3liter.com/Calc2.htm

With the F1 engine having a stroke of 39.7 mm, or 1.563 inches, I'll assume the connecting rod is 3.126 inches (F1 engines use crazy long connecting rods to minimize friction losses, I remember reading somewhere that a rod/stroke ratio of as much as 2 isn't uncommon).

This gives us:

Peak piston speed: -8440.9 feet/Minute (the calculator throws out a negative prefix, but I'll just ignore that because I can't be arsed to calculate this manually), which is approx. 91.92 mph.

Considering that it reaches that speed, and then decelerates again to nothing twice per engine revolution, so 40 thousand times a minute, or 666.66... times a second, the following numbers for acceleration are impressive but don't appear entirely incredible:

Maximum postivie acceleration: 6741 g
Maximum negativ acceleration: -11107 g

1g is about 9.81 m/s², so anyone fancying checking the math, go for it.

So, to work this out for the Wartsilla, we'd need to know the connecting rod length.