Napier Deltic
The Napier Deltic is a cunning 2 stroke diesel engine named after the Greek letter delta (Δ). Designed and produced by Napier its opposed piston design doesn't require a heavy head, making for a lightweight engine. It's a uniflow design, meaning gas flow in the cylinder is one-way, mild supercharging improves exhaust gas scavenging.
Early designs failed because of the difficulty in arranging all three pistons movement in one delta, Napier solved this problem by gearing the crankshafts so that one of them rotated in the opposite direction as demonstrated in this hypnotic diagram.
posted by Chris at 2:26 pm
2 Step to the white courtesy phone:
Intrested to find this. My father-in-law worked on the Deltic whilst an apprentice at Napier. When working it was hugely powerful but also had some spectacular bench failures. See this also; http://sideburnmag.blogspot.com/2009/02/magazines-are-better-than-blogs.html
November 23, 2009 8:23 am
cheers dude, perhaps he was talking about this failure?
I was just feeling a little underwhelmed by acres of print being dedicated this year to the R1's crank... is that really as different as engineering gets?
Oh I know there are sturdy accounting reasons but there are oh so many different ways to skin a cat.
November 23, 2009 3:11 pm
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