270 horsepower from a 1.6 litre engine?

[aeropilot]

Escy said:

aeropilot said:

Back in 2000, Saab were claiming 230hp out of their revolutionary variable compression ratio development engine, and that was a supercharged 1.6L 5 cyl engine, so 270hp some decade and a half later seems logical progress.

In a decade and a half they didn't manage to bring their revolutionary variable compression ratio engine to market did they?

Unfortunately, it's initial development coincided with GM buying 100% of Saab, at which point, they cancelled the SVC engine. It was waaaaay too sophisticated for GM to comprehend it

[Jonny_]

Willy Nilly said:

These threads about this new fangled turbo charging make me laugh. I can't think of any heavy duty diesel that isn't turbo charged. It's exactly the same principal, more power from the same displacement and these are engines that have to work extremely hard for a living. Car engines get a very easy ride, they don't spend hours and sometimes days at full load, they don't get any shock loads and you can't be running flat out down a road and hit a hill of such steepness that it stalls the engine within a coupe of seconds.

Genuinely interested, what application subjects an engine to this?

I work with some backup diesels of around 300 to 500kVA, which are specced to deal with a shock load from a 100kW induction motor on startup (roughly equivalent to a shock load of 200kW for a short time). That load does make even the big old 80-odd litre Blackstone beasts lurch slightly, but nowhere close to stalling.

[Willy Nilly]

Jonny_ said:

Willy Nilly said:

These threads about this new fangled turbo charging make me laugh. I can't think of any heavy duty diesel that isn't turbo charged. It's exactly the same principal, more power from the same displacement and these are engines that have to work extremely hard for a living. Car engines get a very easy ride, they don't spend hours and sometimes days at full load, they don't get any shock loads and you can't be running flat out down a road and hit a hill of such steepness that it stalls the engine within a coupe of seconds.

Genuinely interested, what application subjects an engine to this?

I work with some backup diesels of around 300 to 500kVA, which are specced to deal with a shock load from a 100kW induction motor on startup (roughly equivalent to a shock load of 200kW for a short time). That load does make even the big old 80-odd litre Blackstone beasts lurch slightly, but nowhere close to stalling.

A combine harvester operates at high idle, very often they will show 100% load on what ever monitor they have. I've stalled one and it's not uncommon. I was using a flair mower on the last tractor I had, it's fairly light load for it, so put it in the economy pto gear, so 1600 rpm. Some tosser had chucked a tyre in the field, the mower found it and stalled the tractor. Same machine on a different tractor without economy PTO and running at almost high idle, found a chewy bit of straw and stopped the 7.5 litre turbo diesel in it's tracks. On another tractor I stalled it sub soiling, jut rolling along and it found a tight spot in the soil and had the engine stopped before I could hit the clutch.

There are forage harvesters now with 1,000hp. By 6000 hours the engines are leaking piles of scrap. High idle and full load all of the time.

[Lowtimer]

By 6,000 hours without a fair amount of rebuilding most petrol and diesel engines are scrap, to be fair.

[xRIEx]

Lowtimer said:

By 6,000 hours without a fair amount of rebuilding most petrol and diesel engines are scrap, to be fair.

If averaging 30mph across the life of the vehicle, that's 180,000 miles - shouldn't be scrap in that time with the correct maintenance.

[StottyEvo]

IanCress said:

ikarl said:

In 1994 (20 years ago) you could buy a Subaru Impreza WRX STi which produced a reliable 300bhp from a 2ltr - you certainly didn't need a 4l V8

This is the Impreza that has no power below 3000rpm, then goes utterly mental above it? Whilst Impreza buyers from the mid 90's may have been happy with this power delivery, it won't wash with modern buyers who want the torque of a large engine with the economy of a small one.

You could put a twin scroll turbo on the Impreza so power starts from very low down. People are doing this on big power Evos with decent results. Also you'll find the old Jap turbo engines are supremely reliable, the only downsides being fuel consumption and emissions.

In answer to the op I'd expect that it's very difficult to extract big power and have an engine pass the euro 6 emissions tests.

[Jonny_]

Willy Nilly said:

A combine harvester operates at high idle, very often they will show 100% load on what ever monitor they have. I've stalled one and it's not uncommon. I was using a flair mower on the last tractor I had, it's fairly light load for it, so put it in the economy pto gear, so 1600 rpm. Some tosser had chucked a tyre in the field, the mower found it and stalled the tractor. Same machine on a different tractor without economy PTO and running at almost high idle, found a chewy bit of straw and stopped the 7.5 litre turbo diesel in it's tracks. On another tractor I stalled it sub soiling, jut rolling along and it found a tight spot in the soil and had the engine stopped before I could hit the clutch.

There are forage harvesters now with 1,000hp. By 6000 hours the engines are leaking piles of scrap. High idle and full load all of the time.

Cheers Willy - interesting stuff. I'd always presumed agricultural tackle (like our gensets) to be pretty unstressed in the interest of longevity - evidently not! That's some force needed to stop a big diesel at speed, how do the gearboxes, driveshafts, couplings etc stand up to it?

(sorry to derail the thread - talk of big engines and machinery has got my geek mode firmly engaged... )

[Willy Nilly]

xRIEx said:

Lowtimer said:

By 6,000 hours without a fair amount of rebuilding most petrol and diesel engines are scrap, to be fair.

If averaging 30mph across the life of the vehicle, that's 180,000 miles - shouldn't be scrap in that time with the correct maintenance.

The forage harvester operates at high idle and the best way to operate them is have the engine fully loaded. So get in you car, put it on a motorway and put a brick on the throttle, then run it like that for 10 hours. Add to that huge shock loads on the engine and drive line. One manufacturer was using a 16 litre V8 in them that features in lorries and could do 20,000 hours no problem in that application. People were having engine failures at 1200 hours. So likening to doing 30mph in a car is about as far from reality as possible, it would be more like 600,000 miles of track days.

[otolith]

Might be better to ask how many hours a car could do as a racing school trainer.

[Willy Nilly]

Jonny_ said:

Cheers Willy - interesting stuff. I'd always presumed agricultural tackle (like our gensets) to be pretty unstressed in the interest of longevity - evidently not! That's some force needed to stop a big diesel at speed, how do the gearboxes, driveshafts, couplings etc stand up to it?

(sorry to derail the thread - talk of big engines and machinery has got my geek mode firmly engaged... )

It very much depends on what the machine is doing. They are designed to stand quite a bit of hammer. The big, high density balers you see during the summer will have at least 220 horse power on them with the tractor wide open at 2200 rpm or so. The plunger that compresses the material will trip 33 times a minute and even with the massive (290kg) flywheel it will drag the engine down to about 1700 rpm when it hits TDC. Imagine that for 10 hours a day. Machine like this will have slip protection in the drive line to protect both the machine and the tractor from serious shock. It is still not unheard of to break the PTO drive line in the tractor.

Normally when you see machine in the soil it is just a very hard, steady, continuous pull. Modern tractors with CVT transmissions will have a piece of software that you can choose between economy on lighter jobs or keeping the engine fully loaded. You just set your preset speed a little higher than it can cope with and let the software ease the transmission back to the point where the engine is a full load.

A friend of mine melted 2 pistons on his tractor with just over 5000 engine hours on it, though I suspect there were two faulty injector, but he works his very hard.

What has this to do with the OP? Well these are all turbo charged, normally intercooled, common rail, multi valve engines that are being slogged to death. Not some little car engine that just potters around the nations roads.

[MrsFallon]

Jonny_ said:

Wonder what the service intervals are? That's a very stressed little engine. Biggest reason for manufacturers keeping specific outputs down is longevity.

12,000 miles

[xRIEx]

Willy Nilly said:

xRIEx said:

Lowtimer said:

By 6,000 hours without a fair amount of rebuilding most petrol and diesel engines are scrap, to be fair.

If averaging 30mph across the life of the vehicle, that's 180,000 miles - shouldn't be scrap in that time with the correct maintenance.

The forage harvester operates at high idle and the best way to operate them is have the engine fully loaded. So get in you car, put it on a motorway and put a brick on the throttle, then run it like that for 10 hours. Add to that huge shock loads on the engine and drive line. One manufacturer was using a 16 litre V8 in them that features in lorries and could do 20,000 hours no problem in that application. People were having engine failures at 1200 hours. So likening to doing 30mph in a car is about as far from reality as possible, it would be more like 600,000 miles of track days.

I was disputing Lowtimer's suggestion, nothing about harvesters.

[Jonny_]

MrsFallon said:

Jonny_ said:

Wonder what the service intervals are? That's a very stressed little engine. Biggest reason for manufacturers keeping specific outputs down is longevity.

12,000 miles

Cheers

That's higher than I expected, I dimly recall some of the Mitsubishi Lancer Evo engines had an interval of only 6000 miles and that was at lower specific outputs than this 1.6!

Time will tell, but if these engines prove capable of six-figure mileages then I for one will be most impressed with the engineering.

[Axionknight]

I wonder how different this engine is to the one Citroen used in the DS3 Racing, which may very well have been made from chocolate, google the the failure rates, even the 155bhp THP hasn't been without issue. I test drove a DS3-R, went home to do some research, very close to signing myself up, without a doubt, until I googled "Citroen DS3 Racing" and the third option the the recommendations list finished with "engine problems", half an hours digging put me off for good - and I told the Citroen dealer when he phoned.

Any mechanical connection between the two? I believe so.

[MrsFallon]

Axionknight said:

I wonder how different this engine is to the one Citroen used in the DS3 Racing, which may very well have been made from chocolate, google the the failure rates, even the 155bhp THP hasn't been without issue. I test drove a DS3-R, went home to do some research, very close to signing myself up, without a doubt, until I googled "Citroen DS3 Racing" and the third option the the recommendations list finished with "engine problems", half an hours digging put me off for good - and I told the Citroen dealer when he phoned.

Any mechanical connection between the two? I believe so.

Yes it's the same basic engine unit, but it has had a significant amount of development work. It's a BMW/PSA unit and is also found in the last model Mini Cooper S.

[rigga]

Lowtimer said:

By 6,000 hours without a fair amount of rebuilding most petrol and diesel engines are scrap, to be fair.

The MTU engines in our fleet of trains typically get a planned change at 450000 miles, only rev to 1800rpm Max and I'd say 90% reach that level before major damage.

[rigga]

MrsFallon said:

Yes it's the same basic engine unit, but it has had a significant amount of development work. It's a BMW/PSA unit and is also found in the last model Mini Cooper S.

Its fair to say it has issue's ....


To add the mini jcw version can be mapped to 280hp these days with a couple of changes, Decat and larger front intercooler.

Edited by rigga on Sunday 5th October 11:05

[Jonny_]

rigga said:

The MTU engines in our fleet of trains typically get a planned change at 450000 miles, only rev to 1800rpm Max and I'd say 90% reach that level before major damage.

That's reassuring - one of our sites has a new MTU-powered backup genset, vaguely recall the contractors mentioning the same basic engine is used in railway applications as well. Given that 99% of it's usage will be a monthly self-test for a few hours using a 300kW (I think) load bank, to get to the equivalent of your 450,000 miles would take centuries!

I can't remember the precise details but it's a dirty great V16 turbodiesel producing very close to 1MW (think its something like 996kW). Governed to 1500rpm to give a 50Hz AC supply from the 4-pole alternator, so would imagine if allowed to run to 1800rpm it would produce a fair bit more power.

[MC Bodge]

valiant said:

Sorry, but if you're only getting 30mpg out of a Fiesta ecoboost then the car is either broken, you're driving everywhere at 6000rpm or you've forgotten it has another gear.

I've got one in Focus form and even doing 80mph it will return around 40mpg and nearer 50mpg at 70mph

Quite. Claiming to manage only 30mpg out of a 1.0 ecoboost is one of those statements (like 100bhp cars being "dangerously slow") that gives the opposite impression of the driver to that which was intended.

I experimented with a Focus 1.0 and got around 30mpg for a short, lead-footed, high revving, throttle blipping, back road jaunt. Over the course of a normal day I managed high 40s mpg in both of the ones I've driven.

[MrsFallon]

rigga said:

Its fair to say it has issue's ....


To add the mini jcw version can be mapped to 280hp these days with a couple of changes, Decat and larger front intercooler.

Edited by rigga on Sunday 5th October 11:05

Yep, I have one with less than 10k miles on the clock and it's have the timing chain tensioner replaced.