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Air-cooled engines rely on the circulation of air directly over heat dissipation fins or hot areas of the engine to cool them in order to keep the engine within operating temperatures. Air-cooled designs are far simpler than their liquid-cooled counterparts, which require a separate radiator, coolant reservoir, piping and pumps.
Air-cooled engines are widely seen in applications where weight or simplicity is the primary goal. Their simplicity makes them suited for uses in small applications like chainsaws and lawn mowers, as well as small generators and similar roles. These qualities also make them highly suitable for aviation use, where they are widely used in general aviation aircraft and as auxiliary power units on larger aircraft. Their simplicity, in particular, also makes them common on motorcycles.
Most modern internal combustion engines are cooled by a closed circuit carrying liquid coolant through channels in the engine block and cylinder head. A fluid in these channels absorbs heat and then flows to a heat exchanger or radiator where the coolant releases heat into the air (or raw water, in the case of marine engines). Thus, while they are not ultimately cooled by the liquid, as the heat is exchanged with some other fluid like air, because of the liquid-coolant circuit they are known as liquid-cooled.
In contrast, heat generated by an air-cooled engine is released directly into the air. Typically this is facilitated with metal fins covering the outside of the Cylinder Head and cylinders which increase the surface area that air can act on. Air may be force fed with the use of a fan and shroud to achieve efficient cooling with high volumes of air or simply by natural air flow with well designed and angled fins.
In all combustion engines, a great percentage of the heat generated, around 44%, escapes through the exhaust. Another 8% or so ends up in the oil, which itself has to be cooled in an oil cooler. This means less than half of the heat has to be removed through other systems. In an air-cooled engine, only about 12% of the heat flows out through the metal fins. [1] Air cooled engines usually run noisier, however it provides more simplicity which gives benefits when it comes to servicing and part replacement and is usually cheaper to be maintained. [2]
Many motorcycles use air cooling for the sake of reducing weight and complexity. Few current production automobiles have air-cooled engines (such as Tatra 815), but historically it was common for many high-volume vehicles. The orientation of the engine cylinders is commonly found in either single-cylinder or coupled in groups of two, and cylinders are commonly oriented in a horizontal fashion as a Flat engine, while vertical Straight-four engine have been used. Examples of past air-cooled road vehicles, in roughly chronological order, include:
During the 1920s and 30s there was a great debate in the aviation industry about the merits of air-cooled vs. liquid-cooled designs. At the beginning of this period, the liquid used for cooling was water at ambient pressure. The amount of heat carried away by a fluid is a function of its capacity and the difference in input and output temperatures. As the boiling point of water is reduced with lower pressure, and the water could not be efficiently pumped as steam, radiators had to have enough cooling power to account for the loss in cooling power as the aircraft climbed. The resulting radiators were quite large and caused a significant amount of aerodynamic drag. [4]
This placed the two designs roughly equal in terms of power to drag, but the air-cooled designs were almost always lighter and simpler. In 1921, the US Navy, largely due to the efforts of Commander Bruce G. Leighton, decided that the simplicity of the air-cooled design would result in less maintenance workload, which was paramount given the limited working area of aircraft carriers. Leighton's efforts led to the Navy underwriting air-cooled engine development at Pratt & Whitney and Wright Aeronautical. [4]
Most other groups, especially in Europe where aircraft performance was rapidly improving, were more concerned with the issue of drag. While air-cooled designs were common on light aircraft and trainers, as well as some transport aircraft and bombers, liquid-cooled designs remained much more common for fighters and high-performance bombers. The drag issue was upset by the 1929 introduction of the NACA cowl, which greatly reduced the drag of air-cooled engines in spite of their larger frontal area, and the drag related to cooling was at this point largely even. [4]
In the late 1920s into the 1930s, a number of European companies introduced cooling system that kept the water under pressure allowed it to reach much higher temperatures without boiling, carrying away more heat and thus reducing the volume of water required and the size of the radiator by as much as 30%. They could also eliminate the radiator entirely using evaporative cooling, allowing it to turn to steam and running the steam through tubes located just under the skin of the wings and fuselage, where the fast moving outside air condensed it back to water. While this concept was used on a number of record-setting aircraft in the late 1930s, it always proved impractical for production aircraft for a wide variety of reasons. [5]
In 1929, Curtiss began experiments replacing water with ethylene glycol in a Curtiss D-12 engine. Glycol could run up to 250 C and reduced the radiator size by 50% compared to water cooled designs. The experiments were extremely successful and by 1932 the company had switched all future designs to this coolant. At the time, Union Carbide held a monopoly on the industrial process to make glycol, so it was initially used only in the US, with Allison Engines picking it up soon after. It was not until the mid-1930s that Rolls-Royce adopted it as supplies improved, converting all of their engines to glycol. With the much smaller radiators and less fluid in the system, the weight and drag of these designs was well below contemporary air-cooled designs. On a weight basis, these liquid-cooled designs offered as much as 30% better performance. [6]
In the late- and post-war era, the high-performance field quickly moved to jet engines. This took away the primary market for late-model liquid-cooled engines. Those roles that remained with piston power were mostly slower designs and civilian aircraft. In these roles, the simplicity and reduction in servicing needs is far more important that drag, and from the end of the war on almost all piston aviation engines have been air-cooled, with few exceptions. [6]
As of 2020 [update] , most of the engines manufactured by Lycoming and Continental are used by major manufacturers of light aircraft Cirrus, Cessna and so on. Other engine manufactures using air-cooled engine technology are ULPower and Jabiru, more active in the Light-Sport Aircraft (LSA) and ultralight aircraft market. Rotax uses a combination of air-cooled cylinders and liquid-cooled cylinder heads.
Some small diesel engines, e.g. those made by Deutz AG and Lister Petter are air-cooled. Probably the only big Euro 5 truck air-cooled engine (V8 320 kW power 2100 N·m torque one) is being produced by Tatra. BOMAG part of the FAYAT group also utilizes an air cooled inline 6 cylinder motor, in many of their construction vehicles.
Stationary or portable engines were commercially introduced early in the 1900s. The first commercial production was by the New Way Motor Company of Lansing, Michigan, US. The company produced air-cooled engines in single and twin cylinders in both horizontal and vertical cylinder format. Subsequent to their initial production which was exported worldwide, other companies took up the advantages of this cooling method, especially in small portable engines. Applications include mowers, generators, outboard motors, pump sets, saw benches and auxiliary power plants and more.
The radial engine is a reciprocating type internal combustion engine configuration in which the cylinders "radiate" outward from a central crankcase like the spokes of a wheel. It resembles a stylized star when viewed from the front, and is called a "star engine" in some other languages.
A radiator is a heat exchanger used to transfer thermal energy from one medium to another for the purpose of cooling and heating. The majority of radiators are constructed to function in cars, buildings, and electronics.
The Heinkel He 100 was a German pre-World War II fighter aircraft design from Heinkel. Although it proved to be one of the fastest fighter aircraft in the world at the time of its development, the design was not ordered into series production. Approximately 19 prototypes and pre-production examples were built. None are known to have survived the war.
A flat engine is a piston engine where the cylinders are located on either side of a central crankshaft. Flat engines are also known as horizontally opposed engines, however this is distinct from the less common opposed-piston engine design, whereby each cylinder has two pistons sharing a central combustion chamber.
A flat-four engine, also known as a horizontally opposed-four engine or boxer engine, is a four-cylinder piston engine with two banks of cylinders lying on opposite sides of a common crankshaft. The most common type of flat-four engine is the boxer-four engine, each pair of opposed pistons moves inwards and outwards at the same time.
An antifreeze is an additive which lowers the freezing point of a water-based liquid. An antifreeze mixture is used to achieve freezing-point depression for cold environments. Common antifreezes also increase the boiling point of the liquid, allowing higher coolant temperature. However, all common antifreeze additives also have lower heat capacities than water, and do reduce water's ability to act as a coolant when added to it.
The hyper engine was a 1930s study project by the United States Army Air Corps (USAAC) to develop a high-performance aircraft engine that would be equal to or better than the aircraft and engines then under development in Europe. The project goal was to produce an engine that was capable of delivering 1 hp/in3 (46 kW/L) of engine displacement for a weight of less than 1 lb/hp delivered. The ultimate design goal was an increased power-to-weight ratio suitable for long-range airliners and bombers.
Internal combustion engine cooling uses either air or liquid to remove the waste heat from an internal combustion engine. For small or special purpose engines, cooling using air from the atmosphere makes for a lightweight and relatively simple system. Watercraft can use water directly from the surrounding environment to cool their engines. For water-cooled engines on aircraft and surface vehicles, waste heat is transferred from a closed loop of water pumped through the engine to the surrounding atmosphere by a radiator.
In automotive design, an RR, or rear-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout places both the engine and drive wheels at the rear of the vehicle. In contrast to the RMR layout, the center of mass of the engine is between the rear axle and the rear bumper. Although very common in transit buses and coaches due to the elimination of the drive shaft with low-floor buses, this layout has become increasingly rare in passenger cars.
The Packard V-1650 Merlin is a version of the Rolls-Royce Merlin aircraft engine, produced under license in the United States by the Packard Motor Car Company. The engine was licensed to expand production of the Rolls-Royce Merlin for British use. The engine also filled a gap in the U.S. at a time when similarly powered American-made engines were not available.
A coolant is a substance, typically liquid, that is used to reduce or regulate the temperature of a system. An ideal coolant has high thermal capacity, low viscosity, is low-cost, non-toxic, chemically inert and neither causes nor promotes corrosion of the cooling system. Some applications also require the coolant to be an electrical insulator.
A motorcycle engine is an engine that powers a motorcycle. Motorcycle engines are typically two-stroke or four-stroke internal combustion engines, but other engine types, such as Wankels and electric motors, have been used.
The Rolls-Royce Goshawk was a development of the Rolls-Royce Kestrel that used evaporative or steam cooling. In line with Rolls-Royce convention of naming piston engines after birds of prey, it was named after the goshawk.
A heater core is a radiator-like device used in heating the cabin of a vehicle. Hot coolant from the vehicle's engine is passed through a winding tube of the core, a heat exchanger between coolant and cabin air. Fins attached to the core tubes serve to increase surface area for heat transfer to air that is forced past them by a fan, thereby heating the passenger compartment.
The wax thermostatic element was invented in 1934 by Sergius Vernet (1899–1968). Its principal application is in automotive thermostats used in the engine cooling system. The first applications in the plumbing and heating industries were in Sweden (1970) and in Switzerland (1971).
Oil cooling is the use of engine oil as a coolant, typically to remove surplus heat from an internal combustion engine. The hot engine transfers heat to the oil which then usually passes through a heat-exchanger, typically a type of radiator known as an oil cooler. The cooled oil flows back into the hot object to cool it continuously.
The Continental XI-1430 Hyper engine was a liquid-cooled aircraft engine developed in the United States by a partnership between the US Army Air Corps and Continental Motors. It was the "official" result of the USAAC's hyper engine efforts that started in 1932, but never entered widespread production as it was not better than other available engines when it finally matured. In 1939, the I-1430-3 was designated as the engine to power the Curtiss XP-55, an extremely radical pusher-engine fighter design that would not reach production.
Radiators are heat exchangers used for cooling internal combustion engines, mainly in automobiles but also in piston-engined aircraft, railway locomotives, motorcycles, stationary generating plants or any similar use of such an engine.
The Meredith effect is a phenomenon whereby the aerodynamic drag produced by a cooling radiator may be offset by careful design of the cooling duct such that useful thrust is produced by the expansion of the hot air in the duct. The effect was discovered in the 1930s and became more important as the speeds of piston-engined aircraft increased over the next decade.
Hopper cooling is a simple form of water cooling used for small stationary engines. The defining feature of hopper cooling, amongst other water-cooled engines, is that there is no radiator. Cooling water is heated by the engine and evaporates from the surface of the hopper as steam.