Luckily, I was sitting next to Red and learned all about the BIG diesel ship motors he works on. I learned how to take one apart, how they are put together, how the fuel systems work, that they normally only run around 2-300 RPM's, that a "fast" motor will run about 800 RPM's....
This is what else I learned while waiting on the food:
A diesel engine (also known as a compression-ignition engine) is an internal combustion engine that uses the heat of compression to initiate ignition to burn the fuel, which is injected into the combustion chamber. This is in contrast to spark-ignition engines such as a petrol engine (gasoline engine) or gas engine (using a gaseous fuel as opposed to gasoline), which uses a spark plug to ignite an air-fuel mixture. The engine was developed by Rudolf Diesel in 1893.
The diesel engine has the highest thermal efficiency of any regular internal or external combustion engine due to its very high compression ratio. Low-speed diesel engines (as used in ships and other applications where overall engine weight is relatively unimportant) can have a thermal efficiency that exceeds 50%.[1][2]
Diesel engines are manufactured in two-stroke and four-stroke versions. They were originally used as a more efficient replacement for stationary steam engines. Since the 1910s they have been used in submarines and ships. Use in locomotives, trucks, heavy equipment and electric generating plants followed later. In the 1930s, they slowly began to be used in a few automobiles. Since the 1970s, the use of diesel engines in larger on-road and off-road vehicles in the USA increased. As of 2007, about 50% of all new car sales in Europe are diesel.[3]
The world's largest diesel engine is currently a Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C Common Rail marine diesel of about 84,420 kW (113,210 hp) @ 102 rpm[4] output.[5]
Rudolf Diesel was born in Paris in 1858 into a family of German expatriates.[6] He was educated at Munich Polytechnic. After graduation he was employed as a refrigerator engineer, but his true love lay in engine design. Diesel designed many heat engines, including a solar-powered air engine. In 1892 he received patents in Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and filed in the United States for "Method of and Apparatus for Converting Heat into Work".[7] In 1893 he described a "slow-combustion engine" that first compressed air thereby raising its temperature above the igniting-point of the fuel, then gradually introducing fuel while letting the mixture expand "against resistance sufficiently to prevent an essential increase of temperature and pressure", then cutting off fuel and "expanding without transfer of heat".[citation needed] In 1894 and 1895 he filed patents and addenda in various countries for his Diesel engine; the first patents were issued in Spain (No.16,654), France (No.243,531) and Belgium (No.113,139) in December 1894, and in Germany (No.86,633) in 1895 and the United States (No.608,845) in 1898.[8] He operated his first successful engine in 1897.
Though best known for his invention of the pressure-ignited heat engine that bears his name, Rudolf Diesel was also a well-respected thermal engineer and a social theorist. Diesel's inventions have three points in common: they relate to heat transfer by natural physical processes or laws; they involve markedly creative mechanical design; and they were initially motivated by the inventor's concept of sociological needs. Rudolf Diesel originally conceived the diesel engine to enable independent craftsmen and artisans to compete with industry.[9]
At Augsburg, on August 10, 1893, Rudolf Diesel's prime model, a single 10-foot (3.0 m) iron cylinder with a flywheel at its base, ran on its own power for the first time. Diesel spent two more years making improvements and in 1896 demonstrated another model with a theoretical efficiency of 75%, in contrast to the 10% efficiency of the steam engine. By 1898, Diesel had become a millionaire. His engines were used to power pipelines, electric and water plants, automobiles and trucks, and marine craft. They were soon to be used in mines, oil fields, factories, and transoceanic shipping.
The diesel internal combustion engine differs from the gasoline powered Otto cycle by using highly compressed hot air to ignite the fuel rather than using a spark plug (compression ignition rather than spark ignition).
In the true diesel engine, only air is initially introduced into the combustion chamber. The air is then compressed with a compression ratio typically between 15:1 and 22:1 resulting in 40-bar (4.0 MPa; 580 psi) pressure compared to 8 to 14 bars (0.80 to 1.4 MPa) (about 200 psi) in the petrol engine. This high compression heats the air to 550 °C (1,022 °F). At about the top of the compression stroke, fuel is injected directly into the compressed air in the combustion chamber. This may be into a (typically toroidal) void in the top of the piston or a pre-chamber depending upon the design of the engine. The fuel injector ensures that the fuel is broken down into small droplets, and that the fuel is distributed evenly. The heat of the compressed air vaporizes fuel from the surface of the droplets. The vapour is then ignited by the heat from the compressed air in the combustion chamber, the droplets continue to vaporise from their surfaces and burn, getting smaller, until all the fuel in the droplets has been burnt. The start of vaporisation causes a delay period during ignition and the characteristic diesel knocking sound as the vapour reaches ignition temperature and causes an abrupt increase in pressure above the piston. The rapid expansion of combustion gases then drives the piston downward, supplying power to the crankshaft.[24] Engines for scale-model aeroplanes use a variant of the Diesel principle but premix fuel and air via a carburation system external to the combustion chambers.
As well as the high level of compression allowing combustion to take place without a separate ignition system, a high compression ratio greatly increases the engine's efficiency. Increasing the compression ratio in a spark-ignition engine where fuel and air are mixed before entry to the cylinder is limited by the need to prevent damaging pre-ignition. Since only air is compressed in a diesel engine, and fuel is not introduced into the cylinder until shortly before top dead centre (TDC), premature detonation is not an issue and compression ratios are much higher.
The MAN S80ME-C7 low speed diesel engines use 155 gram fuel per kWh for an overall energy conversion efficiency of 54.4%, which is the highest conversion of fuel into power by any internal or external combustion engine.[1] Diesel engines are more efficient than gasoline (petrol) engines of the same power rating, resulting in lower fuel consumption. A common margin is 40% more miles per gallon for an efficient turbodiesel. For example, the current model Škoda Octavia, using Volkswagen Group engines, has a combined Euro rating of 6.2 L/100 km (38 miles per US gallon, 16 km/L) for the 102 bhp (76 kW) petrol engine and 4.4 L/100 km (54 mpg, 23 km/L) for the 105 bhp (78 kW) diesel engine.
However, such a comparison does not take into account that diesel fuel is denser and contains about 15% more energy by volume. Although the calorific value of the fuel is slightly lower at 45.3 MJ/kg (megajoules per kilogram) than petrol at 45.8 MJ/kg, liquid diesel fuel is significantly denser than liquid petrol. This is significant because volume of fuel, in addition to mass, is an important consideration in mobile applications. No vehicle has an unlimited volume available for fuel storage.
Adjusting the numbers to account for the energy density of diesel fuel, the overall energy efficiency is still about 20% greater for the diesel version.
While a higher compression ratio is helpful in raising efficiency, diesel engines are much more efficient than gasoline (petrol) engines when at low power and at engine idle. Unlike the petrol engine, diesels lack a butterfly valve (throttle) in the inlet system, which closes at idle. This creates parasitic loss and destruction of availability of the incoming air, reducing the efficiency of petrol engines at idle. In many applications, such as marine, agriculture, and railways, diesels are left idling and unattended for many hours, sometimes even days. These advantages are especially attractive in locomotives (see dieselisation).
The average diesel engine has a poorer power-to-weight ratio than the petrol engine. This is because the diesel must operate at lower engine speeds[46] and because it needs heavier, stronger parts to resist the operating pressure caused by the high compression ratio of the engine and the large amounts of torque generated to the crankshaft. In addition, diesels are often built with stronger parts to give them longer lives and better reliability, important considerations in industrial applications.
For most industrial or nautical applications, reliability is considered more important than light weight and high power. Diesel fuel is injected just before the power stroke. As a result, the fuel cannot burn completely unless it has a sufficient amount of oxygen. This can result in incomplete combustion and black smoke in the exhaust if more fuel is injected than there is air available for the combustion process. Modern engines with electronic fuel delivery can adjust the timing and amount of fuel delivery (by changing the duration of the injection pulse), and so operate with less waste of fuel. In a mechanical system, the injection timing and duration must be set to be efficient at the anticipated operating rpm and load, and so the settings are less than ideal when the engine is running at any other RPM than what it is timed for. The electronic injection can "sense" engine revs, load, even boost and temperature, and continuously alter the timing to match the given situation. In the petrol engine, air and fuel are mixed for the entire compression stroke, ensuring complete mixing even at higher engine speeds.
Diesel engines usually have longer stroke lengths chiefly to facilitate achieving the necessary compression ratios, but also to reduce the optimal operating speed (rpm). As a result piston and connecting rods are heavier and more force must be transmitted through the connecting rods and crankshaft to change the momentum of the piston. This is another reason that a diesel engine must be stronger for the same power output as a petrol engine.
Yet it is this characteristic that has allowed some enthusiasts to acquire significant power increases with turbocharged engines by making fairly simple and inexpensive modifications. A petrol engine of similar size cannot put out a comparable power increase without extensive alterations because the stock components cannot withstand the higher stresses placed upon them. Since a diesel engine is already built to withstand higher levels of stress, it makes an ideal candidate for performance tuning at little expense. However, it should be said that any modification that raises the amount of fuel and air put through a diesel engine will increase its operating temperature, which will reduce its life and increase service requirements. These are issues with newer, lighter, high-performance diesel engines which are not "overbuilt" to the degree of older engines and they are being pushed to provide greater power in smaller engines.
The addition of a turbocharger or supercharger to the engine greatly assists in increasing fuel economy and power output, mitigating the fuel-air intake speed limit mentioned above for a given engine displacement. Boost pressures can be higher on diesels than on petrol engines, due to the latter's susceptibility to knock, and the