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Air-cooled engines rely on the circulation of air directly overheat dissipation fins or hot areas of theengine 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 separateradiator, 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 likechainsaws andlawn mowers, as well as smallgenerators and similar roles. These qualities also make them highly suitable for aviation use, where they are widely used ingeneral aviation aircraft and asauxiliary power units on larger aircraft. Their simplicity, in particular, also makes them common onmotorcycles.
Most moderninternal combustion engines are cooled by a closed circuit carrying liquidcoolant through channels in the engine block and cylinder head. A fluid in these channels absorbs heat and then flows to aheat exchanger orradiator where the coolant releases heat into the air (orraw water, in the case ofmarine engines). Thus, while they are notultimately cooled by the liquid, as the heat is exchanged with some other fluid like air, because of the liquid-coolant circuit they are known asliquid-cooled.
In contrast, heat generated by an air-cooled engine is released directly into the air. Typically this is facilitated with metalfins covering the outside of the cylinder head andcylinders 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 theoil, which itself has to be cooled in anoil 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]
Manymotorcycles use air cooling for the sake of reducing weight and complexity. Few current production automobiles have air-cooled engines (such asTatra 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 aflat engine, while verticalstraight-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 theboiling 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 ofaerodynamic 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, theUS Navy, largely due to the efforts of CommanderBruce 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 ofaircraft carriers. Leighton's efforts led to the Navy underwriting air-cooled engine development atPratt & Whitney andWright 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 sometransport aircraft andbombers, liquid-cooled designs remained much more common forfighters and high-performance bombers. The drag issue was upset by the 1929 introduction of theNACA 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 systems 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%, which opened the way to a new generation of high-powered, relatively low-drag liquid cooled inline engines such as theRolls-Royce Merlin andDaimler-Benz DB601, which had an advantage over the unpressurised early versions of theJumo 211. This also led to development work attempting to eliminate the radiator entirely usingevaporative 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 withethylene glycol in aCurtiss D-12 engine. Ethylene 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 ethylene glycol, so it was initially used only in the US, withAllison Engines picking it up soon after. It was not until the mid-1930s thatRolls-Royce adopted it as supplies improved, converting all of their engines to ethylene 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 tojet 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 than 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 byLycoming andContinental are used by major manufacturers of light aircraftCirrus,Cessna and so on. Other engine manufactures using air-cooled engine technology areULPower andJabiru, more active in the Light-Sport Aircraft (LSA) andultralight aircraft market.Rotax uses a combination of air-cooled cylinders and liquid-cooled cylinder heads.
Some small diesel engines, e.g. those made byDeutz AG andLister 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 byTatra. 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 ofLansing, 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.
