shoebear
Veteran Member
- Joined
- Aug 1, 2002
- Location
- Colorado Springs, CO
- TDI
- 1998 Jetta, 2003 Jetta Wagon, 2005 New Beetle, 2013 Sportwagen
The initial diesel engine test of the pistons was on gigantic mining dump trucks with CAT engines. The mine was having problems with some of their newer engines where the rings would get fouled with carbon and break (if I remember right). They rebuilt two of the CAT engines identically except for the pistons and ran a test for some number of operating hours. The Speed of Air pistons solved the ring carbon fouling. The company also does oil analysis to determine oil change intervals, and the SoA engine required fewer than half the changes of the other engine and might have gone longer, except that they hit a CAT max hours limit well before the analysis indicated a change needed. The SoA engine also got considerably better fuel economy, but I don't think they documented it at the time because that wasn't the problem they were trying to solve. Since the trucks are worth a large number of dollars per hour to the mine, at the end of the test, the mine said the savings in downtime on the extra oil changes alone paid for the SoA pistons.Too bad they aren't still doing the Mythbusters show. That would be a good one. Two brand new engines run side by side in dyno cells with full instrumentation.
You should watch the video I posted. It goes into lots of details.
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