| Author | Message | ||
     Whistler |
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRL-2033lok&feature=player _embedded | ||
| Xl1200r |
170-180hp is pretty good, but how much does it weigh? That turbo will help to negate things a bit - sounds like he said they can get max TO performance over FL11. | ||
| Mr_grumpy |
Nothing particularly new there then. Packard were building aero-diesels over 80 years ago, the Germans & the Russians both had diesel powered planes in WWII. The technology has moved on a whole lot though & clean, light, common-rail diesels would be ideally suited for aircraft use I'd have thought. | ||
| Dwardo |
They had one of those Packard radial diesels at the Garber facility (where the Smithsonian restores their aircraft) back when they had yearly open houses. Before the docent yelled at me, I got to paw it long enough to guess that it had a single valve for both intake and exhaust and it appeared to both inhale and exhale through a tube on top of the cylinder head. No exhaust system would have been possible and it must have been incredibly loud. That engine never went anywhere but the Junkers diesels were quite successful. | ||
| Moxnix |
Welcome back to the era of gear drives and reduced TBO's. | ||
| Aesquire |
Hasn't been a successful ( actually sold several and flying ) Diesel airplane engine since WW2, that I recall? Early ones were tried in such planes as the Ford Trimotor, but tended to be heavy and low powered. Here's a chart of Packard engines... http://www.enginehistory.org/Packard/StatsAllPacka rdAero.pdf http://www.enginehistory.org/Museums/packard1.shtm l http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_DR-980 The Mercedes design from the early 21st century should be a bit better..... ( like the 140hp engine in my car, from the same research program ) The advantage of running Jet-A, however is enormous. That's why that diesel conversion of the Kawasaki 650 is being made. Eventually, 110LL is history. Lucky for us, Lycoming and others are, with agonizing slowness, updating the engines from the 50's and there is some hope. If you have an older plane, it's going to eventually be expensive to remake the engine to run on auto gas. | ||
| Moxnix |
And avgas is not only going away eventually, but essentially not available in much of the world. I've got two designs, air-cooled 160 h.p. flat four, direct drive, and a bigger brother at 260 h.p., worked out with a chap who designed, built & certified a 450 hp water-cooled diesel for special applications. R&D money has pretty well dried up from many standpoints. Perhaps the Chinese want them. | ||
| Brumbear |
Yeah the Russian Pe bomber the Germans had a possibly hiekel not sure I believe the Sturmovik had some Diesel versions as well. This was in wwII BTW | ||
| Brumbear |
Sorry Junkers not heikel the motors were 2 stroke diesels | ||
| Gregtonn |
John McGinnis, a very innovative designer from Montana, intends to use one in an airplane of his own design and enter it into the NASA/CAFE Green Flight Challenge. http://synergyaircraft.com/ G | ||
| Whistler |
http://www.deltahawkengines.com | ||
| Nik |
If you have an older plane, it's going to eventually be expensive to remake the engine to run on auto gas. Most older planes can run on Mogas just fine. Both my 140 and 170 had STCs for it. They were designed to run 80 octane avgas, which has 1/4 the lead of 100 "low lead". Only problem is finding it without ethanol. | ||
| Whistler |
Frank Thielert interview not long before the meltdown - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqC8Th4Rkws | ||
| Syonyk |
Welcome back to the era of gear drives and reduced TBO's. And? If it's cheaper to run hourly (factoring in fuel, maintenance, overhaul), then I really don't care what the details up front are. 100LL, like it or not, is a legacy fuel that will eventually disappear. The nutjobs in CA are trying really, really hard to kill GA out there because of "ZOMG LEAD." The problem is that the 75% of the piston fleet that *can* run on motor gas (if you can get real gasoline - difficult many places anymore, since they dilute it with perfectly good alcohol) is that they're not the ones burning all the fuel! Something like 25% of the fleet (the big piston twins being flown daily) burns 75% of the fuel - and they run on the edge of detonation with 100LL. Anything else and they'll destroy themselves. | ||
| Dwardo |
If high octane avgas becomes unavailable, the warbirds will be gone, at least the really cool ones. I think that would be a tragedy. | ||
| Whistler |
Something like Sunoco 260GTX might do the trick but it's not cheap. "Diesel Aviation Engines" written in 1940- http://www.enginehistory.org/diesels.htm |
