Internal combustion engine cooling
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.
Water has a higher heat capacity than air, and can thus move heat more quickly away from the engine, but a radiator and pumping system add weight, complexity, and cost. Higher power engines can move more weight but can also generate more waste heat, meaning they are generally water-cooled. Radial engines allow air to flow around each cylinder directly, giving them an advantage for air cooling over straight engines, flat engines, and V engines. Rotary engines have a similar configuration, but the cylinders also continually rotate, creating an air flow even when the vehicle is stationary.
Aircraft design more strongly favors lower weight and air-cooled designs. Rotary engines were popular on aircraft until the end of World War I, but had serious stability and efficiency problems. Radial engines were popular until the end of World War II, until gas turbine engines largely replaced them. Modern propeller-driven aircraft with internal-combustion engines are still largely air-cooled. Modern cars generally favor power over weight, and typically have water-cooled engines. Modern motorcycles are lighter than cars and both cooling methods are common. Some sport motorcycles are cooled with both air and oil that is sprayed underneath the piston heads.
Overview
s 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 inefficient, so more heat energy enters the engine than comes out as mechanical power; the difference is waste heat which must be removed. Internal combustion engines remove waste heat through cool intake air, hot exhaust gasses, and explicit engine cooling.Engines with higher efficiency have more energy leave as mechanical motion and less as waste heat. Some waste heat is essential: it guides heat through the engine, much as a water wheel works only if there is some exit velocity in the waste water to carry it away and make room for more water. Thus all heat engines need cooling to operate.
Cooling is also needed because high temperatures damage engine materials and lubricants and becomes even more important in hot climates. 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 incidental heat loss, a design called adiabatic. Such engines can achieve high efficiency but compromise power output, duty cycle, engine weight, durability, and emissions.
Basic principles
Most internal combustion engines are fluid cooled using either air or a liquid coolant run through a heat exchanger cooled by air. Marine engines and some stationary engines have ready access to a large volume of water at a suitable temperature. The water may be used directly to cool the engine, but often has sediment, which can clog coolant passages, or chemicals, such as salt which can chemically damage the engine. Thus, engine coolant may be run through a heat exchanger that is cooled by the body of water.Most liquid-cooled engines use a mixture of water and chemicals such as antifreeze, rust inhibitors, and other additives. These antifreeze mixtures, also known as "engine coolant," are typically glycol-based fluids that contain a mixture of ethylene glycol, additives, and water. Common types of coolants include Inorganic Acid Technology, Organic Acid Technology, and Hybrid Organic Acid Technology fluids. Some antifreezes use no water at all, instead relying on liquids with different properties, such as propylene glycol or a combination of propylene glycol and ethylene glycol. While air-cooled engines primarily rely on air to regulate temperature, many also use oil cooling to help maintain optimal temperatures for both engine components 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 in a Wankel engine, 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 requirement is to adequately serve the entire engine, as the whole engine fails if just one part overheats. Therefore, it is vital that the cooling system keep all parts at suitably low temperatures. Liquid-cooled engines are able to vary the size of their passageways through the engine block so that coolant flow may be tailored to the needs of each area. Locations with either high peak temperatures or high heat flow may require generous cooling. This reduces the occurrence of hot spots, which are more difficult to avoid with air cooling. Air-cooled engines may also vary their cooling capacity by using more closely spaced cooling fins in that area, but this can make their manufacture difficult and expensive.
Only the fixed parts of the engine, such as the block and head, are cooled directly by the main coolant system. Moving parts such as the pistons, and to a lesser extent the crankshaft and connecting rods, must rely on the lubrication oil as a coolant, or to a very limited amount of conduction into the block and thence the main coolant. High performance engines frequently have additional oil, beyond the amount needed for lubrication, sprayed upwards onto the bottom of the piston just for extra cooling. Air-cooled motorcycles often rely heavily on oil-cooling in addition to air-cooling of the cylinder barrels.
Liquid-cooled engines usually have a circulation pump. The first engines relied on thermosiphon cooling alone, where hot coolant left the top of the engine block and passed to the radiator, where it was cooled before returning to the bottom of the engine. Circulation was powered by convection alone.
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 engine metal is at 250 °C and the air is at 20 °C, then there is a 230 °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 135 °C which is then cooled with 20 °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.
However, properties of the coolant also affect cooling. As example which compares water and oil as coolants, one gram of oil can absorb about 55% of the heat for the same rise in temperature. Oil has about 90% the density of water, so a given volume of oil can absorb only about 50% of the energy of the same volume of water. The thermal conductivity of water is about four times that of oil, which can aid heat transfer. The viscosity of oil can be ten times greater than water, increasing the energy required to pump oil for cooling, and reducing the net power output of the engine.
Comparing air and water, air has vastly lower heat capacity per gram and per volume and less than a tenth the conductivity, but also much lower viscosity.
Continuing the calculation from two paragraphs above, air cooling needs ten times of the surface area, therefore the fins, and air needs 2000 times the flow velocity and thus a recirculating air fan needs ten times the power of a recirculating water pump.
Moving heat from the cylinder to a large surface area for air cooling can present problems including 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 the same temperature desired for engine cooling. This has an advantage in that it absorbs a great deal of energy with very little rise in temperature, 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. 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 exchanger 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. Any cooling of the exhaust and the turbine of the turbocharger reduces the amount of power available to the turbine, so the exhaust system is often insulated between engine and turbocharger to keep the exhaust gasses as hot as possible.
The temperature of the cooling air may range from well below freezing to 50 °C. Further, while engines in long-haul boat or rail service may operate at a steady load, road vehicles often see widely varying and quickly varying load. Thus, the cooling system is designed to vary cooling so the engine is neither too hot nor too cold. Cooling system regulation includes adjustable baffles in the air flow ; a fan which operates either independently of the engine, such as an electric fan, or which has an adjustable clutch; and a thermostatic valve or a thermostat that can block the coolant flow when too cool. In addition, the motor, coolant, and heat exchanger have some heat capacity which smooths out temperature increase in short sprints. Some engine controls shut down an engine or limit it to half throttle if it overheats. Modern electronic engine controls adjust cooling based on throttle to anticipate a temperature rise, and limit engine power output to compensate for finite cooling.
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, longevity, and quietness in order to achieve slightly higher reliability; the consequences of a broken airplane engine are so severe, even a slight increase in reliability is worth giving up other good properties to achieve it.
Air-cooled and liquid-cooled engines are both used commonly. Each principle has advantages and disadvantages, and particular applications may favor one over the other. For example, most cars and trucks use liquid-cooled engines, while many small airplane and low-cost engines are air-cooled.