engine cooling system

Engine cooling

Engine cooling is cooling an engine, typically using either air or liquid.


Heat engines generate mechanical power by extracting energy from heat flows, much as a water wheel extracts mechanical power from a flow of mass falling through a distance. Engines are not perfectly efficient, so more heat energy enters the engine than comes out as mechanical power; the difference is waste heat and must be removed. Internal combustion engines remove waste heat through cool intake air, hot exhaust gases, and explicit engine cooling.


Cooling is also needed because high temperatures damage engine materials and lubricants. Internal-combustion engines burn fuel hotter than the melting temperature of engine materials, and hot enough to set fire to lubricants. Engine cooling removes energy fast enough to keep temperatures low so the engine can survive.

Some high-efficiency engines run without explicit cooling and with only accidental heat loss, a design called adiabatic. For example, 10,000 mile-per-gallon "cars" for the Shell economy challenge are insulated, both to transfer as much energy as possible from hot gases to mechanical motion, and to reduce reheat losses when restarting. Such engines can achieve high efficiency but compromise power output, duty cycle, engine weight, durability, and emissions.

Basic Principles


Most liquid-cooled engines use a mixture of water and chemicals such as antifreeze and rust inhibitors. Some use no water at all, instead using a liquid with different properties, such as propylene glycol or a combination of propylene glycol and ethylene glycol. Most "air-cooled" engines use some liquid oil cooling, to maintain acceptable temperatures for both critical engine parts and the oil itself, Most "liquid-cooled" engines use some air cooling, with the intake stroke of air cooling the combustion chamber. An exception is Wankel engines, where some parts of the combustion chamber are never cooled by intake, requiring extra effort for successful operation.

There are many demands on a cooling system. One key is an engine fails if just one part overheats. Therefore, it is vital that the cooling system keep all parts at suitably low temperatures. Other demands include cost, weight, reliability, and durability of the cooling system itself.

Conductive heat transfer is proportional to the temperature difference between materials. If an engine metal is at 300 °C and the air is at 0°C, then there is a 300°C temperature difference for cooling. An air-cooled engine uses all of this difference. In contrast, a liquid-cooled engine might dump heat from the engine to a liquid, heating the liquid to 150°C which is then cooled with 0°C air. In each step, the liquid-cooled engine has half the temperature difference and so at first appears to need twice the cooling area.


Comparing air and water, air has vastly lower heat capacity per gram and per volume (4000) and less than a tenth the conductivity, but also much lower viscosity (200: 17.4 × 10−6 Pa·s for air vs 8.94 × 10−4 Pa·s for water). Air cooling thus relies on a tornado of air to remove heat. Moving heat from the cylinder to a large surface area for air cooling can present problems such as difficulties manufacturing the shapes needed for good heat transfer and the space needed for free flow of a large volume of air. Water boils at about its operating temperature. This has the advantage that it absorbs a great deal of energy with very little rise in temperature (called heat of vaporization), which is good for keeping things cool, especially for passing one stream of coolant over several hot objects and achieving uniform temperature. In contrast, passing air over several hot objects in series warms the air at each step, so the first may be over-cooled and the last under-cooled. However, once water boils, it is an insulator, leading to a sudden loss of cooling where steam bubbles form (for more, see heat transfer). Unfortunately, steam may return to water as it mixes with other coolant, so an engine temperature gauge can indicate an acceptable temperature even though local temperatures are high enough that damage is being done.

An engine needs different temperatures. The inlet including the compressor of a turbo and in the inlet trumpets and the inlet valves need to be as cold as possible. A countercurrent heat exchange with forced cooling air does the job. The cylinder-walls should not heat up the air before compression, but also not cool down the gas at the combustion. A compromise is a wall temperature of 90°C. The viscosity of the oil is optimized for just this temperature. Air cooling is reduced by removing the fins. Cooling-water is then admitted to regulate the temperature. Any cooling of the exhaust and the turbine of the turbo reduces the amount of power available to the turbine. The motor block and the material of the heat exchanger have some heat capacity which smooth out temperature increase in short sprints. Modern electronic regulates the water valve also based on throttle to anticipate a temperature rise and compensate for the finite thermal conductance.

Finally, other concerns may dominate cooling system design. As example, air is a relatively poor coolant, but air cooling systems are simple, and failure rates typically rise as the square of the number of failure points. Also, cooling capacity is reduced only slightly by small air coolant leaks. Where reliability is of utmost importance, as in aircraft, it may be a good trade-off to give up efficiency, durability (interval between engine rebuilds), and quietness in order to achieve slightly higher reliability -- the consequences of a broken airplane engine are so much more severe, even a slight increase in reliability is worth giving up other good properties to achieve it.


Generalization Difficulties

It is difficult to make generalizations about air-cooled and liquid-cooled engines. Air-cooled Volkswagen kombis are known for rapid wear in normal use and sometimes sudden failure when driven in hot weather. Alternately, air-cooled Deutz diesel engines are known for reliability even in extreme heat, and are often used in situations where the engine runs unattended for months at a time.



It is usually more difficult to achieve either low emissions or low noise from an air-cooled engine, two more reasons most road vehicles use liquid-cooled engines. It is also often difficult to build large air-cooled engines, so nearly all air-cooled engines are under 500 kW, whereas large liquid-cooled engines exceed 80 MW (Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C 14-cylinder diesel).

Why Automobile Engines Were Air-Cooled

Cars and trucks using direct air cooling (without an intermediate liquid) were built over a long period beginning with the advent of mass produced passenger cars and ending with a small and generally unrecognized technical change. Before World War II, water cooled cars and trucks routinely overheated while climbing mountain roads, creating geysers of boiling cooling water. This was considered normal, and at the time, most noted mountain roads had auto repair shops to minister to overheating engines.

ACS (Auto Club Suisse) maintains historical monuments to that era on the Susten Pass where two radiator refill stations remain (See a picture here). These have instructions on a cast metal plaque and a spherical bottom watering can hanging next to a water spigot. The spherical bottom was intended to keep it from being set down and, therefore, be useless around the house, in spite of which it was stolen, as the picture shows.

During that period, European firms such as Magirus-Deutz built air-cooled diesel trucks, Porsche built air-cooled farm tractors, and Volkswagen became famous with air-cooled passenger cars. In the USA, Franklin built air-cooled engines.

What Changed and When?


After isolating the pump problem, cars and trucks built for the war effort (no civilian cars were built during that time) were equipped with carbon-seal water pumps that did not leak and caused no more geysers. Meanwhile, air cooling advanced in memory of boiling engines... even though boil-over was no longer a common problem. Air-cooled engines became popular throughout Europe. After the war, Volkswagen advertised in the USA as not boiling, even though new water-cooled cars no longer boiled, but these cars sold well, and without question.

Today practically no air-cooled automotive engines are built, air cooling being fraught with manufacturing expense and maintenance problems. Motorcycles had an additional problem in that a water leak presented a greater threat to reliability, their engines having small cooling water volume, so they were loath to change; today nearly all are water cooled. However, many motorcycles rely on convection circulation with no pump.


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