Hello everyone.
Where I am working there was a opportunity to speak with a mechanic that was swapping out a Caterpillar 3524 from a 797 haul truck. He said that the engines are expected to perform for 14 to 15 thousand hours before overhauls. So my question is what kind of life expectancy can you expect from a GE or EMD diesel engine in a modern AC engine? Basically asking about the 710 and the GEVO diesels.
Thank you
"If you need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm."
I had the opportunity to speak with the GE reps in Denver whilst on an escort move. My question pertained to the turbo rebuilding/replacement on the 7FDL series. They said the turbos should be rebuilt when the engine is overhauled, every 7 to 11 years.
The ALCo 251 manual has one sentence of direction for 8 years of use: Remove and rebuild engine.
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From a builder's plate of a Tier I Dash 9-44CW: "EPA Emissions Useful Life is the earlier of 33,750 MW-hours, 10 years or 750,000 miles per 40 CFR Part 92.9". Seems reasonable that this is about the average prime mover lifespan.
High speed diesels wear faster and require more frequent overhaul and replacement.
Hello,
Thank you for the replies. It is interesting to read what the railroads expect. This would also explain why the horsepower output per cubic liter is for a prime mover in a locomotive is rather low specially when compared to vehicles on the road. Fascinating information.
Frank
Just imagine what 'hot rodders' could get out of a locomotive diesel for power if they tried the tricks of the hot rod trade. It may no longer be Tier compliant but it would be fun to see!
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
BaltACD Just imagine what 'hot rodders' could get out of a locomotive diesel for power if they tried the tricks of the hot rod trade. It may no longer be Tier compliant but it would be fun to see!
I wonder what a 2-stroke on nitro would sound like...
Greetings from Alberta
-an Articulate Malcontent
SD70M-2Dude BaltACD Just imagine what 'hot rodders' could get out of a locomotive diesel for power if they tried the tricks of the hot rod trade. It may no longer be Tier compliant but it would be fun to see! I wonder what a 2-stroke on nitro would sound like...
Boom.
I've heard Alco service people say that an Alco will go much longer between rebuilds than an EMD, but it does need a bit more tinkering in between.
CheersSteveNZ
SD70M-2DudeI wonder what a 2-stroke on nitro would sound like...
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Actually you do not even require hot rodders to get huge numbers. In order for the diesel engines to have the longevity required by the railroads they produce relative low HP per cubic liter. The 710 only produces about 23 hp per liter. The Dodge diesel in the half ton pick up produces 80 hp per liter. As a result if you would get the 710 to produce power like the diesel in the pick up truck you would be looking at about 14,880hp. How long before the engine would blow up? Probably not long.
In a similar vein, I read an article in "Air & Space:Smithsonian" some years back about adapting automobile engines for service in light (4-seat) airplanes. The difference in the duty cycles was a major stumbling block as aircraft engines spend much more time at full throttle than automobile engines.
NorthWest From a builder's plate of a Tier I Dash 9-44CW: "EPA Emissions Useful Life is the earlier of 33,750 MW-hours, 10 years or 750,000 miles per 40 CFR Part 92.9". Seems reasonable that this is about the average prime mover lifespan.
The question for the 10 years is that in service or a hard number of years ? Thinking of all the locos stored at present for who knows how long ?
That may be a function of how they are pickled.
Don't forget the carriers maintain extensive records on the maintenance and repairs that have been applied to each locomotive in their fleet - they make their decisions going forward based on the 'big data' contained in their locomotives history.
blue streak 1 NorthWest From a builder's plate of a Tier I Dash 9-44CW: "EPA Emissions Useful Life is the earlier of 33,750 MW-hours, 10 years or 750,000 miles per 40 CFR Part 92.9". Seems reasonable that this is about the average prime mover lifespan. The question for the 10 years is that in service or a hard number of years ? Thinking of all the locos stored at present for who knows how long ? That may be a function of how they are pickled.
If the words are reproduced exactly from the decal, "whichever comes first, 10 years or 750,000 miles", then it is a "hard" ten years and the engine would have to be lifted and overhauled, or at the very least retested to ensure that it still met the regulations. However reading 40CFR Part 92.9 should clarify this.
M636C
M636CIf the words are reproduced exactly from the decal, "whichever comes first, 10 years or 750,000 miles", then it is a "hard" ten years and the engine would have to be lifted and overhauled, or at the very least retested to ensure that it still met the regulations. However reading 40CFR Part 92.9 should clarify this.
And to simplify this discussion here is the text of Part 92.9 for you.
The quote is exact, and I can post the decal tonight if anyone wishes.
da_kraut As a result if you would get the 710 to produce power like the diesel in the pick up truck you would be looking at about 14,880hp. How long before the engine would blow up? Probably not long.
The challenge would be using all that power. On a six axle 4400 HP locomotive, the traction motors come in just over 700 HP per. On a 14,880 HP locomotive, they'd approach 2,500 per axle. And you thought the GP40's were slippery...
Of course, if you could use that power in mother/slug configurations with six axle units, you'd be down to 1,250 per axle, but that's still pretty hot.
Of course, that assumes that the prime mover could survive such a mod...
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
Over time an engines cylinder bores oval out at the bottom near the crankshaft as that's where the most amount of side thrust is. The more wear and looseness that an engine exhibits would bring it closer to a damaging failure. I'd guess the cost to rebuild a prime mover could buy a cheap house. I once dismantled a Ford/IH 6.9 diesel V8. When I pulled one head off I saw 3 Pistons. The 4th piston was in about 50 pieces in the pan. The rod was bent and two sides of the cylinder was pushed out. When I worked at a Napa parts store a guy brought in a piston from a drag motor. The stem of a valve went through the head of the piston. The valve flipped 180 degrees before piercing the piston. It was cool to look at.
Modeling the "Fargo Area Rapid Transit" in O scale 3 rail.
Nitromethane in a diesel? Burns slower than other fuels, turns oil into molasses. Nitrous Oxide? Whiing, boom! The more massive the rotating assembly, the slower the piston speed has to be. A lot of hot rod tricks would not work in a huge diesel. I think airflow, and boost, have been pretty well figured out by the big players......
BoydOver time an engine's cylinder bores oval out at the bottom near the crankshaft as that's where the most amount of side thrust is.
This is interesting for another reason in this hypothetical discussion: part of the ovaling effect is associated with thrust reaction between piston and rod, and part of it with inertia forces in the rod (which is a factor of relatively high rotational speed). There's also both average and peak tribology failure between piston components and cylinder bore, particularly at high peak machine speed.
In the application of nitromethane or other 'advanced fuels' to a locomotive engine, the horsepower gain will not involve operation at dramatically higher rpm (as it usually does with drag or race motors, where horsepower climbs with increasing rpm well above the peak of the torque curve). So we have to be talking about dramatically higher -- and I mean dramatically higher -- peak and mean effective pressures in an engine that isn't built of Formula One grade exotic materials to be able to spin at the required rpm to make "all those horsepower" the usual way.
There are also some interesting potential questions about injector performance to get full fuel injection into the corresponding swept volume and then full charge mixing, polynucleate ignition, and (reasonably) full combustion at that high an rpm ... assuming we are continuing to try to run this as a compression-ignition engine. (The situation gets worse, far worse, if we plan to meet Tier 4 final emission standards, but neither the 'willing suspension of disbelief' or my ability to keep tongue in cheek without biting will survive taking that discussion too far...)
A potentially interesting discussion might be what form of engine that would fit within packaging limits on a locomotive could actually produce this power density on an 'appropriate' fuel, although I know this is a wide diversion from the original (humorous) premise of 'nitro in a prime mover'). One technology would be a rotating detonation engine, which gets around certain unfortunate characteristics of pulse detonation engines in railroad service (for example, they can make the acoustic signature of a free-piston gas generator seem like a lullaby, which takes some doin'!). There have been some interesting discussions at UT and elsewhere about how you get the power out of a RDE that has a reasonable service life.
Be interesting to discuss whether the operational aspects of higher horsepower per prime mover would justify the higher costs (and potential risks!) of high-energy fuels in a railroad operation. (This is not quite as hypothetical when we consider a transition to something like natural gas as a conventional compression-ignition locomotive fuel; cryomethane is a known hypersonic propellant component...)
As noted, there are a couple of ways to use the additional horsepower. There are pretty quick limits of a variety of kinds, some quite amusing to contemplate, in accelerating a train more quickly. There are also pretty hard limits on higher speed, both in terms of how fast the thing can be made to go and how to use higher speed gainfully in actual railroad operations (see our many threads on higher 'one-speed railroads' for example). So I conclude that the only 'practical' way is to use a larger number of powered axles ... perhaps a much larger number ... which would as noted take the form of road slugs, and might have the additional valuable property of placing the crew a measurable distance away from both the prime mover and the fuel. Note that this significantly takes away from one of the nominal advantages of a 14,000hp single-unit locomotive, that it increases the length of revenue consist that will fit in a given siding length...
The more wear and looseness that an engine exhibits would bring it closer to a damaging failure.
To which might be added that the progression to damaging failure can be very, very quick when even a small critical amount of the 'wear and looseness' develops, even if the engine has been tolerant of the slop up to such point. (This can be characteristic of steam locomotive power, too!)
Theoretically this could be addressed, in a high-specific-hp engine, through the methods we're discussing in the thread on emergency phone-home for accidents. It is theoretically simple to multiplex a few ultrasonic microphones into the data feed sent from a locomotive to GE or whoever, and to arrange some sort of 'notification' page from GE's data center to railroad officials on multiple appropriate levels if certain signatures showing a developing failure begin to be detected. Likewise, as real-time Blackstone-style oil analysis begins to be cost-effective, a wide range of developing failures that show up as chemical traces in the lube oil long before the mechanical noises start could be 'sent through channels' as needed. So both a higher specific power and a somewhat less extended 'expected service life' might be thinkable... on second thought, too many railroads would use this as a helpful guide to keep the thing running with 'acceptable' defliction up to the point of physical breakage, just as they used to do when sending engines out with multiple bad power assemblies, cold-epoxy patched camshaft bearings, and the like...
Now, someplace this discussion might be interesting is in the practical design of internal-combustion or dual-mode/multimode HSR equipment. Here you indeed have a 'market niche' for 14,000hp output from a light, compact, reasonably reliable prime mover...
Randy Vos
"Ever have one of those days where you couldn't hit the ground with your hat??" - Waylon Jennings
"May the Lord take a liking to you and blow you up, real good" - SCTV
I remember reading somewhere many years ago that the engine of a top dragster can last no more than 60 seconds at full throttle without being torn down and rebuilt. That assumes that it will last that long.
Hello everyone,
great responses, thank you everyone.
tree68 da_kraut As a result if you would get the 710 to produce power like the diesel in the pick up truck you would be looking at about 14,880hp. How long before the engine would blow up? Probably not long. The challenge would be using all that power. On a six axle 4400 HP locomotive, the traction motors come in just over 700 HP per. On a 14,880 HP locomotive, they'd approach 2,500 per axle. And you thought the GP40's were slippery... Of course, if you could use that power in mother/slug configurations with six axle units, you'd be down to 1,250 per axle, but that's still pretty hot. Of course, that assumes that the prime mover could survive such a mod...
Not a problem.
Typical European locomotives (and the new ACS-64 for Amtrak) handle 2000+ HP per axle everyday, thank you very much.
N. F.
I always wondered about GP-40 and its 750 HP per axle in relation to the 500 HP per axle of the SD-40. Back in the days where wheel-slip control was a skilled locomotive engineer, 500 HP per axle seemed like partical upper limit.
I especially wondered how the traction motors on the GP-40 handled all of that extra HP. What I finally realize many years later is that the GP-40 has the same fine traction motors as the SD-40. The traction motor really doesn't have a horsepower limit as much as it as a torque limit, and the torque limit has to do with how much tractive effort the pair of wheels on an axle can exert at their rims (without slipping), which is more or less the same, regardless of the horsepower rating (2000 GP-38, 2300 GP-39 (do I have this right?), 3000, GP-40.
What the higher horsepower per axle allows you to do is supply a given amount of torque at a higher speed. Provided the torque limit is not exceeded to slip the wheels or burn out the traction motor, you can supply whatever level of horsepower you want, provided you are going fast enough.
Electrics supply insane levels of horsepower per axle -- because all of that power is there for the collecting from the overhead electric wire. Of course this high horsepower only comes into play at higher speeds beyond what a drag freight operates at.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
The tractive effort is limited by the weight on driving wheels up to the 'critical speed' (typically around 10-15 mph).
If you see the tractive effort diagrams for locomotives like the Voith Maxima (same size and weight, different horsepower), you will see that the diagram is essentially shifted to the right - the 'critical speed' becomes higher.
Horsepower matters after approximately 20 mph or so.
Electrics also have the advantage of short-term ratings, which allows those incredibly high HP ratings but only for short periods before the electrical gear is fried.
CSSHEGEWISCH Electrics also have the advantage of short-term ratings, which allows those incredibly high HP ratings but only for short periods before the electrical gear is fried.
Today's electric one-hour rating is nearly the same as continuous rating.
E.g. the Siemens "Taurus" has a one-hour rating of 6.4 MW *on the rails*(practically the equivalent of two 4400hp diesels, once you take into account losses from the generator to the rail), and a continuous power of 6 MW (if my memory is operating correctly).
Obviously, putting 2000+ hp per axle on the rail requires advanced traction control systems, but it is a daily occurence in Europe (and already on East Coast, with the Amtrak ACS-64).
Cheers,
N.F.
nfotis CSSHEGEWISCH Electrics also have the advantage of short-term ratings, which allows those incredibly high HP ratings but only for short periods before the electrical gear is fried. Today's electric one-hour rating is nearly the same as continuous rating. E.g. the Siemens "Taurus" has a one-hour rating of 6.4 MW *on the rails*(practically the equivalent of two 4400hp diesels, once you take into account losses from the generator to the rail), and a continuous power of 6 MW (if my memory is operating correctly). Obviously, putting 2000+ hp per axle on the rail requires advanced traction control systems, but it is a daily occurence in Europe (and already on East Coast, with the Amtrak ACS-64). Cheers, N.F.
It is easy to put high horsepower to the rail when the loads being hauled are light - like Europe and the NEC. Applying that horsepower when hauling a maximum tonnage train is magnitudes more difficult.
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