Do diesel engines have a place in the energy transition? How about Cat's latest design with 80+ patents on a single platform! Hear all about it from Allen Chen.
Email us: powerbytes@cat.com
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Do diesel engines have a place in the energy transition? How about Cat's latest design with 80+ patents on a single platform! Hear all about it from Allen Chen.
Email us: powerbytes@cat.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/cat-electric-power/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Caterpillar.Electric.Power/
Lou: Good Day and welcome everyone to Power Bytes! I am your host Lou Signorelli and Power Bytes is your destination Podcast for power generation conversations. As always please know how much we appreciate you, our listeners. We hope you find our topics helpful and interesting. There are several ways for you to get in touch with the show. You can send us an email at powerbytes@cat.com, visit us at Cat Electric Power on Facebook or LinkedIn. Please remember to subscribe, leave comments and like our show wherever you listen to your favorite podcast.
Lou: Do you ever wonder what goes into developing a new diesel engine? I mean they have been around for decades, what else can possibly be done to make them better? To dive into that topic, I'm happy to introduce Allen Chen. Allen has over 6 years of engine design experience after graduating from Carnegie Mellon University with a degree in Biomedical and Mechanical engineering. Currently Allen serves as a Product Marketing Manager within Caterpillar’s Industrial Power Systems Division.
Lou: Welcome Allen.
Allen: Hi Lou, thanks for having me.
Lou: Allen let's start from the beginning. And I mean before the first design is even pondered. Where do the basic requirements come from?
Allen: When it comes to an engine, firstly, there are regulatory table-stakes. These table-stakes are the governing bodies that dictate the technical performance of an engine – specifically related to emissions. For example, you cannot sell an unregulated engine into a regulated country for commercial use.
Outside of those table-stakes however, there are 5 main value differentiating categories, or high-level customer critical requirements, people look for in the product, and the input to these particular values come from the people, or end-users, across the entire application landscape.
The 5 categories of basic requirements are 1) Functional Performance, 2) Packaging & Integration, 3) Fluids Consumption, 4) Preventative Maintenance, and 5) Durability and Reliability. There is arguably a 6th category, Brand Perception / Loyalty, but that one is less technically quantifiable.
Going back to the 5 main categories, there is further discretization into subcategories. For example:
• For Functional performance, subcategories include Power, Torque, Response, and Ambient & Altitude Capability.
• For Packaging & Integration, there is weight, space claim, and configurability.
• For Fluids Consumption, there is fuel, DEF, and oil consumption rates.
• For Preventative Maintenance, there is serviceability and service intervals.
• And for Durability and Reliability, one example is number of hours until overhaul.
It is then up to us to weave all of the inputs for each of the subcategories across various applications and regions and come up with an engine platform solution most suitable to handle all of them simultaneously.
Lou: (If not addressed above) How do you validate your understanding of the market requirements?
Allen: These come from a series of surveys, research in the industry, competitive and trend assessments of various engines, visiting tradeshows, reading literature, and working very closely with our Cat dealers. The dealers are the gateway into critical feedback because they collaborate with owners, operators, and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) of machines that use our engines, that ultimately get sold to an end-user
Lou: What is the most recent engine that you've been involved with. Can we walk through the design process? Are you still finding great new ideas to patent and bring to the market?
Allen: The most recent engine that I’ve been involved with, is the new 100% Caterpillar-designed clean-sheet C13D capable of power between 340kW and 515 kW, or 456 to 690 hp. What started off as an incubation exploration project in 2016 eventually evolved into a formal product roll-out. Though I wasn’t there for the initial pen-to-paper calculations for bore, stroke, and power, I came on after those were defined and I was in charge of cooling and lubrication systems architecture and design.
While it would be very convenient to systematically go through designs component by component, or system by system, the reality is that everything is interwoven, and one area undoubtedly affects another area.
I was tasked to architect and design the cooling system. The cooling system has a water pump, which is driven by a belt system – so then I had to architect and design a belt system. The cooling system also contributes to the water jackets inside the cylinder head and block, so I was asked to help design the internal water passages. Furthermore, the cooling system interacts with the lube system, so then I had to work on designing the lube system. As you can imagine, all things within the engine touch oil, so it’s important to design and interact with all of the rotating and actuating components that use oil lubrication, as well as the pump. Moreover, the pump was gear driven, which then embeds me into conversations on the gear train system. My journey didn’t end there, but the point of this story was to illustrate how complex and interwoven every single system or component is within the entirety of the engine.
When we worked on the C13D, we started with laying out an architectural skeleton – the basics are the cylinder bore size, the cylinder bore-spacing, the engine stroke, and the head bolt pattern to achieve a certain power. From there, we investigated hundreds of valve trains, setups, sizes, patterns, and variations in conjunction with air flow passages designed into the cylinder head, all the while balancing coolant passages and possible fuel injection systems and strategies. Once we’ve roughed in those core passages, we started deconstructing and augmenting them as we began thousands and thousands of 1D, 2D, and 3D iterations of skeletal design combinations. After sketching out a “whole package”, we began maturing components to simulate actual performance.
In terms of “new ideas”, yes, there are plenty in the space of internal combustion engines. As of right now, this engine platform has 82 patents. There are more in the pipeline in the form of patent applications. I myself, have 11 patents pertaining to components and system that interact with the cooling and lubrication systems!
Lou: How much testing is done once a final design is complete?
Allen: To answer your question plainly, a lot. Testing firstly came in the form of simulation, with thousands of iterations of design and 1D, 2D, and 3D analyses. We coupled these simulations with our computer-aided designs and launched a matrix of routines to understand and optimize thermophysical behaviors like flows, temperatures, pressures, heat rejections, fatigue, and damage, etc. before we even built the first piece of iron.
Then, after the first piece of iron is built, there are multiple phases of testing. Not only do we conduct performance calibrations, but we also run through suites of durability testing to ensure all of our components meet the Caterpillar brand promise for durability our users have come to expect.
The testing phases start off with demonstrators, where the engines are put into a test cell to demonstrate performance capability. Then there are prototypes built, which go into more rigorous durability testing. Furthermore, these prototypes are sent out into the field to accumulate field-follow hours with partners across a multitude of applications and industries. After prototypes come pilot and production engines, for which, by then, the kinks and issues should all have been worked out.
For simplicity, we’ll say it takes us 3-4 years’ worth of testing before we can roll out a “production product” that we can stand behind and this is because we need to get our durability and reliability right first and foremost. No matter how much performance or capability an engine has, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t last.
Lou: In recent episodes we covered the EU Stage V emission standards. Do you see a future for I.C.E or internal combustion engines given the growing scrutiny of their emissions?
Allen: To directly answer your question, Yes.
Firstly, for fun, we can think about folks with more affinity towards engines, and the love of engines in it of itself: the gearhead, the tuner, the home-mechanic that fixes up a classic car.
However, going back to the general market trends, I would first ask us to contemplate what timescale “future” means. If your perspective is near-term, yes ICE still have a future. If on the other hand you’re considering a more distant time frame, maybe not. In all of the energy transition models and theories, there seems to be an agreement that infrastructure will be needed. I’ll ask you this: As we transition power sources, what do you think will power the very machines to create that infrastructure? It will probably be diesel ICE.
The datacenters, power plants, piping systems, and road systems, etc. for example, that we’ve all come to enjoy have been constructed/created using some form of internal combustion engine. And to use a different source of fuel or power source (like batteries) at scale, involves using a lot of off-highway diesel ICE power to construct.
Secondarily, I would ask us to contemplate “power bands” when we think about engines, or any power source. An incredibly intelligent colleague of mine, Paul Muller, once eloquently painted a picture for me and described the “bathtub curve of power”. On the small end, think of lawnmowers, leaf blowers, and mini excavators. Many of these have already been electrified – there could be a future where they are completely electric. Then on the large end, the site owners, when it makes financial sense, are able to invest in on-site infrastructure to support of their ongoing operations. However, the “middle ground”, where the power is between 160kW and 1 MW. That’s where we will still be using ICE for a long time to come. It may not be ICE with diesel, as it could transform into a spark-ignited fuels of Natural Gas or Hydrogen, or it could be ICE with lower carbon intensity fuels such as DME, Biodiesel, Methanol, etc.
Whatever that solution looks like (diesel, electric, alternative fuels, lower carbon fuels), Caterpillar has already been investing in the research and development of those solutions and will undoubtedly be playing in that field as we work with customers to help them achieve their climate-related goals.
Lou: So Allen, at the end of the day, the Patents and design met the requirements in terms of performance (power density, transient response, ambient range, and noise, etc) all while delivering improved maintenance intervals. Did I get that right?
Allen: Yes Lou, the designs and design patents all serve to meet or exceed the requirements we gathered early in the voice of customer phase of development.
Lou: There you have it folks! I’d like to thank our guest Allen Chen for sharing his expertise with us. For more information on the C13D platform that we’ve been discussing please go to cat.com/c13D or reach out to your local Cat dealer.
Be sure to follow, subscribe, and comment on all your favorite Power Bytes episodes. Till next time, I’m Lou Signorelli wishing you a great rest of your day.