The World's Most Powerful Diesel Engine

trex279 writes "The Wartsila-Sulzer RTA96-C turbocharged two-stroke diesel engine is the world's most powerful diesel engine built to date. Each cylinder displaces a whopping 111,143 cubic inches (1,820 liters, equivalent to a cube 4 feet on a side) and produces 7,780 horsepower. The engine is about the size of a small building." The engine is intended for use in container ships.

Comments

Is more powerful more, or less, efficient?

[walterbyrd]

In terms of fuel consumption, and air pollution, is it better to have one huge powerful engine, or two or more less powerful engines?

er

[mgabrys_sf]

If they're now making desiel engines this size for cargo, I'm curious if perhaps it's time to switch to nuclear. The waste-return equation seems out of whack for petrochemical solutions.

Re:er

[lgw]

A nuclear engine (of a size to produce the same ~100khp) is far less of an environmental worry than the cargo carried by a supertanker. Of course, you'd want a reactor design that wouldn't become a problem when submerged ("you can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor!") but that's not a problematic design constraint - the basic idea behind "pebble bed" reactors would work here.

Really, nuclear engines are only seriosly problematic for airplanes (because of "roll-up"), and even that problem could be designed around. People just have an irrational fear of anything nuclear, and we relally need to get past that if we're going to care about CO2.

Comparable to 1904 steam engine technology

[Animats]

In terms of mere size, this is comparable to steam engines of 1904. The Interborough Rapid Transit Company (the "IRT" to New Yorkers) built a plant in 1904 with a total output of 132,000 horsepower. The compound steam engines had bigger cylinders than this Diesel; 42 inches and 86 inches, compared to 38 inches for the new marine Diesel.

That was the high point of piston engines. Electrical generation was already converting from pistons to turbines, and even that 1904 IRT plant had a few smaller steam turbines.

There have been much more powerful marine powerplants than this, but they're usually multi-engine turbine systems. There's an annoying tendency in commercial shipping to have only one engine on large ships, which occasionally leads to accidents.

copyright violation

[bcrowell]

Hnm...the article is a little disreputable. As far as I can tell, here's what happened. Some guy named Todd Walke scraped photos and diagrams out of the pdfs on this Wartsila web page. He made his own web page, which, AFAICT from Google, no longer exists, possibly because he got a take-down notice from Warsila. Meanwhile, a bunch of other people have mirrored the page. So in other words, the Slashdot story linked to somebody's copyright-violating copy of a copyright-violating copy of some of Wartsila's pics. As other people have pointed out, it's actually not the world's most powerful diesel engine, either. Oh well, the pics are cool!