World’s Largest And Most Powerful Diesel Engine

source:http://wonderfulengineering.com

Have your first look at Wärtsilä RT-flex96C, the world’s largest and most powerful diesel engine in the world today.


Yes, isn’t it awe inspiring and amazing? Manufactured by a Finnish company known as Wärtsilä, this engine is capable of producing 80080 KW power, enough to charge an entire suburban town. The magnificent engine weighs an astounding 23,000 tons. It is a two-stroke turbo charges low speed engine.
Are you wondering where exactly will this huge intimidating machine be used? For a long time now, shipping has proved to be the most efficient form of trade. Just for your information, these massive trading ships weigh thousands of tons and go at decent speeds of more than 35 knots. To provide such huge engine power, the engine has to be robust. The Wärtsilä RT-flex96C will provide all that power and more. The engine has been put into use in September 2006 at Emma Mærsk.

The huge engine has 14 built-in cylinders that consume about 6.5 ounces of diesel in one cycle. Each cylinder is capable of producing about 5700 kW of energy. The design is similar to the RTA96C engine however, the traditional camshaft, hydraulic actuators and pumps have been replaced by the all new state-of-the-art rail technology. The engine speed varies from 22-102 rpm.

The efficient Wärtsilä RT-flex96C can consume 170 g/kWh and has bore of 960 mm. It is also environment friendly and does not release excessive amounts of harmful GHG emissions. The engine is highly efficient and is considered the largest reciprocating engine in the world.
The Wärtsilä RT-flex96C is undoubtedly a wonder of modern engineering. The huge machine is capable of powering any size of ships and its 14 built-in cylinders cater for huge amount of power demands. The remarkable engine is 44 feet tall and 90 feet long.

The ships that transport goods from China to the U.S. are usually Huge. And when we say huge, we are talking about ships weighing 180,000 tons each and 13,000 feet or more in length. A lowly, measly turbo engine cannot even move these gigantic ships. The Wärtsilä RT-flex96C diesel engine produces 109,000 horsepower of energy that runs such ships. Currently, there are about 25 of these huge engines out there in our oceans and 86 more are coming soon. The improved fuel economy, longer life spans and better engine performance ensure bright future prospects for the huge Wärtsilä RT-flex96C engine.

source:http://wonderfulengineering.com

 

Gravitational Waves Help Us Understand Black-Hole Weight Gain

Oct. 17, 2013 — Supermassive black holes: every large galaxy's got one. But here's a real conundrum: how did they grow so big?

Gravitational waves distort space, altering the regular signals from pulsars received by the CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope. (Credit: Swinburne Astronomy Productions)

A paper in today's issue of Science pits the front-running ideas about the growth of supermassive black holes against observational data -- a limit on the strength of gravitational waves, obtained with CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia.
"This is the first time we've been able to use information about gravitational waves to study another aspect of the Universe -- the growth of massive black holes," co-author Dr Ramesh Bhat from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) said.
"Black holes are almost impossible to observe directly, but armed with this powerful new tool we're in for some exciting times in astronomy. One model for how black holes grow has already been discounted, and now we're going to start looking at the others."
The study was jointly led by Dr Ryan Shannon, a Postdoctoral Fellow with CSIRO, and Mr Vikram Ravi, a PhD student co-supervised by the University of Melbourne and CSIRO.
Einstein predicted gravitational waves -- ripples in space-time, generated by massive bodies changing speed or direction, bodies like pairs of black holes orbiting each other.
When galaxies merge, their central black holes are doomed to meet. They first waltz together then enter a desperate embrace and merge.
"When the black holes get close to meeting they emit gravitational waves at just the frequency that we should be able to detect," Dr Bhat said.
Played out again and again across the Universe, such encounters create a background of gravitational waves, like the noise from a restless crowd.
Astronomers have been searching for gravitational waves with the Parkes radio telescope and a set of 20 small, spinning stars called pulsars.
Pulsars act as extremely precise clocks in space. The arrival time of their pulses on Earth are measured with exquisite precision, to within a tenth of a microsecond.
When the waves roll through an area of space-time, they temporarily swell or shrink the distances between objects in that region, altering the arrival time of the pulses on Earth.
The Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA), and an earlier collaboration between CSIRO and Swinburne University, together provide nearly 20 years worth of timing data. This isn't long enough to detect gravitational waves outright, but the team say they're now in the right ballpark.
"The PPTA results are showing us how low the background rate of gravitational waves is," said Dr Bhat.
"The strength of the gravitational wave background depends on how often supermassive black holes spiral together and merge, how massive they are, and how far away they are. So if the background is low, that puts a limit on one or more of those factors."
Armed with the PPTA data, the researchers tested four models of black-hole growth. They effectively ruled out black holes gaining mass only through mergers, but the other three models are still a possibility.
Dr Bhat also said the Curtin University-led Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope will be used to support the PPTA project in the future.
"The MWA's large view of the sky can be exploited to observe many pulsars at once, adding valuable data to the PPTA project as well as collecting interesting information on pulsars and their properties," Dr Bhat said.