Deltahawk Diesel Jet Aircraft Engine - Engine Week 2024

Welcome to this year's engine week. It's time to learn all about engines in aviation. Firewall 4 kits, sales and support for the engines, overhauls. Firewall 4 components, radiators, cowlings, engine mounts. This is based on several hundred Corvair-powered Zeniths that have flown over the years. Thunderbolt is kind of its own animal for Lycoming. Now it's Continental Titan, that's why they came together. Yeah, and you know we're looking for service and support dealers currently. This is the UL 260i and this is the low compression version. All right, so you know every other year we do engine week, the engine week series to introduce what's out there and what's forthcoming in engines. And this one I'm sure everybody's been following for years and years, but it's finally truly to market and I wanted to stop by and get all the details. So Dennis, if you could introduce yourself first, what you do in the company, and we'll dive into the details. Sure, my name is Dennis Webb. A couple things at the company, I do a lot of marketing, but I'm also in charge of FAA certification of our products as well. Okay. I've been with the company for 19 years, so I'm kind of a historian as well. All right, and just to give people a little history, how long has this project been in play? This project has been in play a long time. Like I said, I've been here 19 years, well before I started, over 20 years. It's taken a long time. Our founders really, I think, had a lot of foresight as to what was coming with fuels and efficiency, and they saw what was going on with, with lack of a better word, old ABGAS technology engines designed in the 40s and so forth, and they thought there had to be a better way. Sure. And so they saw this back then. What they didn't realize, what I didn't realize, what a whole lot of us didn't realize, was just how hard this was to design and develop a clean sheet aviation engine and get it certified. To bring it to market. Bring it to market, big challenge, big challenge. So a question I have is that a lot of people ask me and other people, like when you get into aviation and you're choosing an airframe or kit out there, like what is your mission, right? And you want to choose an airframe, an airplane that suits your mission. So I would assume as an aircraft engine designer slash manufacturer, you'd have that same mindset. So what was the original mission for designing this in the first place? The mission was really pretty simple, and that is, and I kind of already touched on it, is the existing engines were literally old technology, high maintenance, high fuel efficiency, and that was even before the ABDAS issue was around back 20 some years ago. So the mission was to make an engine which was extraordinarily reliable, easy to operate, very little maintenance when you need it. It's very simple to maintain, worldwide fuel availability. I mean jet fuel, Burns jet fuel, jet fuel is available around the world. So that's kind of the mission, just to make this, it's more like operating your car instead of, you know, all the, what it takes to operate it. I'm using lubbers, all it takes to operate an engine today, the typical engine. Okay, and to add to that question is like the, I guess what I meant is like the horsepower range, just to fit a particular airframe or the range, because there's a lot of like light sport aircraft, there's a demand for engines there, and you got certified and heavier aircraft, so that part of it. And then what are the horsepower ranges of this? Okay, horsepower range, yeah, we have three engines available right now. We got our type certification with the FAA last year, April of 2023, and that's 180 horsepower engine. We very conservatively rated that because we wanted to be, you know, cautious out of the gate. We now have, we've since announced of the same engine block, 200 and 235 horsepower engines as well. So, you know, if you get down to the low end, you're talking, you know, 172s and PA-28s and, you know, SR-20s, and on the certified side, on the experimental side, you're into, you know, RV-14s and so forth. If it's the same block, how are you accomplishing, you're not just simply turn a dial? No, not just turn a dial. The engine is a very robust engine. It's turbocharged and supercharged, so it's got a lot of air breathing capability. But basically what, to get higher horsepower, it takes more air, more fuel. So we start making turbocharger changes for the larger engines and fuel changes, but the basic architecture, the basic parts are the same for all three engines. So, all right, so we got the horsepower ranges here. Let's go back into the details of the engine, how it operates, right? The very basic is this is a two-stroke diesel type engine, even though you use jet fuel, correct? Correct. And why did you choose the diesel, I'm sorry, the jet fuel and two-stroke? Because there's other ways of going about that, right? To me, that's very unique, but the answer to this question. It's very unique, and I love the opportunity to explain it. I hope I have about four hours for this here. So anyways, I get asked that a lot, and first of all, diesel was chosen because diesels are going for very high fuel efficiency compared to gas engines because they're high compression. And they also, diesel fuel and jet fuel are very close cousins. They're both kerosene-based fuels. There's slight chemistry changes, slight specification changes, but there's not diesel fuel at the airport. The other issue with diesel fuel is it gels at a much higher temperature, which is kind of important in aviation, where jet A, jet A1 freeze at minus 40, minus 47 C. So we really wanted to make a jet fuel burning engine. Yes, it will burn diesel, but you got to worry about gelling, and so that's why we chose diesel. Now, two-stroke, I love to talk about. I'm always cautious to talk about two-stroke unless I can explain it, and so I'm glad we can. Most people, when you say two-stroke, they think of weed eater, or they think of a 1970 Kawasaki that goes with a lot of smoke, burns a lot of fuel. Oh yeah, you got to add oil in the gas. It doesn't sound very high-tech. It doesn't sound very high-tech. A diesel two-stroke is fundamentally different than a gas two-stroke, and it has to do with, it depends on what technical you want to get, but a gas two-stroke is what's called crankcase scavenging, where you're sucking, you're bringing the air in through the crankcase to charge the cylinder with air. Well, you're bringing it through the crankcase, so that means you have to also have the fuel and the oil. Sure. That's why you put 40 different wine, 50 to 1 oil and gas in your chainsaw. Sure. And so that's what people think about. So two-strokes got advantages because they're simple. You don't have cams and valves and rocker arms and lifters and valve seals and valve guides and all that stuff. We wanted that simplicity, but the downside of a gas two-stroke I just talked about, high fuel consumption, smoky, bad emissions, not a very good low-end life because they're not very well lubricated. Diesel two-strokes are fundamentally different. We use a supercharger and a turbocharger to technically turn to scavenge, which means to get the exhaust out and get the air charge in. So that's moving the air. That's moving the air, yes. So the crankcase, the part where you need some real live lubrication, unlike a gas two-stroke, our engine is lubricated just like your car engine. Your pressure-lubricated bearings last forever. It's got nothing to do with the combustion side, with the air side, like a gas two-stroke does. Okay. So we charge the air into the cylinders with the supercharger and at the altitude of the turbocharger. So when you're charging the air, it's just air. So for a gas two-stroke, when you're charging, you're also getting some fuel out the exhaust ports. It's just air. And then as the piston comes up and compresses the mixture, then it's, as you can see right here, the fuel injector, and the fuel injector injects the fuel. So that answers the question right there, because looking at this, you're like, wow, it's supercharged and turbocharged. This thing must be like wicked horsepower and stuff. But this is literally just to move the air through the engine, and then a turbo acts as it normally would. Yeah, and they actually act together. So you get the advantage of two-stroke, meaning very few parts. You get the advantage of a two-stroke of every piston fires every revolution, as opposed to four-stroke every other one. This has got the firing pulses of your car V8. Okay. Because it fires every revolution. And this is a four-cylinder, correct? It's a four-cylinder, but a four-stroke fires every other revolution. This fires every revolution. So this is the same firing pulses of a V8 car. Makes sense. It's very smooth. So you get the advantages of low parts count. You get the advantage of firing a smoother engine because it fires every revolution, but without the disadvantages people think of of a gas two-stroke, which is the efficiency of the diesel and low emissions. And any diesel engine, I believe, needs to be directly injected, correct? That is also... That's correct. The case here. Yeah, that's correct. It's direct injection. And on that topic, you can't see it from this view, our whole philosophy was keep it simple. Keep it simple. We want few parts. So a four-stroke diesel, there are out there on the market. They're mostly automotive conversions. Use automotive technology, they adapt. And because they're a four-stroke and they fire every revolution, in order to get the power up, you have to get spinning faster. An automotive diesel will spin at 4,200, 4,400 rpm. Guess what? Props don't like that. Right. So they have to have a gearbox. By using a two-stroke, our redline rpm is 2,600 rpm direct drive. Right. Because we're getting the same volume of air through this as if it was a four-stroke spinning twice as fast. So you can run a really big prop with this. Yeah, you can run a big prop with this. I mean, it's it's... And it's very smooth, which is very important. And again, without a gearbox. The other thing on the fuel system is we chose... Again, simple, simple, simple. I already started with that theme here. We do not have a FedEx on here. We don't have electronics on here. Love it. We managed to come up... And some people look at the sales and say, oh, it's an old, fast mechanical fuel system. I can't tell you how much money we developed this very high-tech mechanical fuel system. Okay. We have one fuel pump and one injector per cylinder. If you would fail a fuel pump, you lose 25% of your power and keep flying. You can't say that about a FedEx system. You lose a high-pressure fuel rail, it goes quiet really fast. So... And this is directly driven off of the crank? Directly driven off the crank. Yeah, absolutely. So... Well, there is no camshaft in this. There's no camshaft. So... Yeah, it's directly driven off the crank. And so what we get here is a combination of extraordinary performance, but yet without all the extra parts, without fancy electronic controls. Which, by the way, to service, you need computers and you got sensors in the room. Absolutely. Actuator sits simple, simple, simple. You can fix this with hand tools. Yeah. Simple. And anyway, so that's kind of the fundamental philosophy. And I can add more things if you'd like. Now, we're sitting here talking about this and this is sitting upright, but in reality, it is inverted in the aircraft. Is that correct? Well, normally. And that's a great question. While it's a pressure-lubricated crankcase, as I said, there's two ways to you can do a pressure-lubricated crankcase. One is a traditional way, like in a car, called the wet sump. Your oil is in the bottom of the engine. We use what's called a dry sump system, where the oil tank is separate. So why do we do that? For what you just said, is that allows us to mount this in a V configuration for some applications. It's what we call inverted, which is where the V is pointing down. And actually, if you want a helicopter, we can point it straight up. Okay. And when it comes even to things, applications where you might have a lot of, you know, angle, a wet sump engine, you can uncover the oil port and you're kind of in trouble. Ours, there's no problem because the oil tank is not moving around with the engine. So I assume that also means that inside the engine, you have either oil squirters or oil sprayers going, putting oil in the right places so you can have it in any configuration. Yeah. Inside, I mean, the bearings are traditional pressure bearings, like plane bearings that are pressure fed. Then we have a very high volume of oil squirters cooling the bottom of the pistons. I just want to pop in real quick and invite you all to our 31-day build challenge, which starts in December, December 1st through the 31st, which is why the 31 days. Every day is an opportunity to get something done on your aircraft, even if it's something very small, like reading plans or setting out something for the next day. The idea is everybody has their end of year, new year's resolution, and this is kind of a way to get started very early in December. And amongst other builders, they're doing the same thing. So I invite you to post some, we prefer video, but definitely photos of what you got going on in your hangar or your home workshop, or even at your kitchen counter. Share with everybody what you got going on on the Experimental Aircraft Channel group. That's on Facebook. Just search Experimental Aircraft Channel and groups that should pop right up and join us for the 31-day build challenge. And also let's take a moment right now to thank our sponsors. Dynon Avionics at Dynon.com, the premier provider of glass panel avionics systems for experimental and light sport aircraft. And visit our website at experimentalaircraftchannel.com for new videos and easy-to-navigate playlists and so much more. All right, so talking about the fuel system, and of course the next question is, what does the fuel burn on this thing? I guess in cruise and takeoff, you'll be burning the most amount of power. Yeah, yeah. I mean, economy cruise on the 180, 200, 235, or like 7, 10. Stepping up the horsepower. Stepping up the horsepower. Again, overall, we found 35-40% less gallons per hour than a traditional gas engine, which you expect on a diesel. Diesels are thermodynamically more efficient. Also being as a diesel, do you use like some type of Rotella oil, or what kind of oil do you use? Well, we have certified it with an oil that Philips makes. It's called Diesel. Philips 66 Victory Diesel. It's a 10W40 oil. It's commercially available. Okay, so another off-the-shelf thing there, obviously. Off-the-shelf, yeah. What is the life expectancy of this, like the TBO? Obviously, you don't have fleet hours on this yet, but what is the projected TBO? Well, that's a two-part, three-part question. First of all, the TBO is established by the FAA, and they establish that if they start seeing some fleet hours. And so, this engine is going to go a long time for a couple reasons, and I'll get to your specific answer here in a moment. There's a number of things that really kill engines. First of all, air-cooled engines. Air-cooled engines, the cylinders have a terrible life. Right. You know, 400-degree temperatures. Hot, cold, hot, cold. Hot, cold, hot, cold. And actually, the air coming in across the fins, you can have a couple hundred-degree temperature difference just across the top and bottom of the cylinder. Because of that, they have to build them with very sloppy clearances, because you've got to be able to take all the heat. And again, it's hot, cold, hot, cold, hot, cold. Our cylinders are liquid-cooled, which means they live a nice, happy 200-degree F life, so we can make it very tight tolerance. That's an interesting way to put that. They live a nice 200-degree life, like they're basking in the air conditioning, practically. From an engine standpoint, they are, but it's no different than your car. How long does a car engine last today? Because it's got water-cooled. I once had a guy here at an EAA show say, I don't want your engine. You can't change the cylinder. And I said, well, that's true. When was the last time you changed one in your car? Yeah. And he said, oh, I never have. I said, yeah. 300,000 miles still going or something. It's liquid-cooled. So that's part of the engine life story. The other part of the engine life story is what really wears in your typical avogadro engine. It's the cams, the lifters, the rockers, the pushrods don't wear, but the valve guides, the valve seals. Other things are moving at high speed. All the stuff moving at high speed, highly stressed, and are also thermally stressed. We don't have any of that. So now I'm going to get back to where you wanted to know the answer to that question. We are doing two things. Number one, our goal is on conditions, more like a turbine. We need more data to show that. We have had some discussions with the FAA about their early discussions, but we do need more data to get that. If you look at what's inside this engine, the rotating parts inside this engine, there is a crankshaft and four pistons and four connecting rods moving. That's it. Right. That's it. All the other moving parts are on the outside. The oil pump is on the outside. The fuel pump's on the outside. The cooling pump, everything's externally accessible. So when it comes to actual TBL, meaning I have to tear an engine apart, we expect it to go a very long time because there's not much in there you have to do anything with. Absolutely. And the things that you might want to worry about, you can inspect. We can actually inspect the inside of the engine and the cylinders without even taking it out of the airplane. So we have ways to do inspection for it. As far as design life, and I'm going to go out on a limb here because this is not an established number yet. My gut feels as an engineer, this is going to go well over $3,000. I was going to say, during an annual inspection, then what would be some of the things you'd be ticking boxes to check on this to make sure things are going as planned? Well, you're going to do a cylinder inspection. Typically, you pull out a gold plug and look and just make sure it looks happy inside. That's a technical engine term. But you're looking for if there's any anomalies in the cylinder. And then we'll wait for the airplane to go by. And then we have a specific, obviously, oil changes, filter changes, those kinds of things. There'll be some temperature or some pressure checks and so forth. But for the most part, there's not a lot to do. Belt tension. All right. So going back to the cooling system, there's several people that are running auto conversions, if you will. And there's a couple of different types and brands of coolant they're using there. What are you guys using in this? We'll use a 50-50 glycol-based coolant. We specify one called Cool-N-All. There might be others in the future, but it's a traditional system. Traditional coolant system. Obviously, it runs off of heat. It's a diesel, so it creates heat. Would you have to have a very large radiator to keep this cool? Or what's that sizing look like compared to the engine? It's not real big. I mean, it's a bit because for a couple of reasons. Number one, diesels, because they're more efficient, don't make as much heat. In fact, our EGTs run about 400 degrees cooler than a gas engine. So on the exhaust side, that's because of the efficiency. Well, the same as just thermal efficiency in general. You're taking more of that energy and turning it into work as opposed to excess heat. So it's easier to cool a diesel engine than it is a gas engine. So there's less heat rejection in the first place. But we've done a lot of work with optimizing. There's three coolers in this for the most part. You get the radiator for general cooling. You have an oil cooler, which firstly, every aviation has got an oil cooler. And because we're turbocharged, we also have an intercooler. Some people call them a charger. So there's three coolers inside the package. All right, so now for the big question. Let's crack the fingers here and ask the big question. What does it weigh? And then what does it weigh installed to be running? Okay. Ish. And I'm going to give you an ish question. I mean, an ish answer. How is that? And here's the reason why. Because we keep taking weight out. The engine, as it sits today, which is the engine block with the fuel system. Basically, as you see here, including the turbocharger, including the exhaust system, starter, alternator. Some companies, if you look at their weights, don't include starter and alternator. We include all that. It's 335 pounds. Okay. I recognize that's a turbocharged engine. Sure. So if you just... Turbocharged and supercharged. Supercharged and supercharged. Yeah. So you've got a... With that weight itself is, I think, less than a turbocharged gas engine. Yeah, it's very competitive. Okay. You asked, but the total installed weight, certainly have coolers and so forth. We keep taking weight out. So I'm going to guess the weight numbers. Since last year, we've taken out, I think, 78 pounds out of the engine and the package. That's a lot. Whizzing away at it. Yeah. So we're up, I think, right around 400. Okay. And this is designed around, like you said, 180, 210, 235? Yeah, 180, 200, 235. Yeah. So you are going to be pulling a bigger aircraft around with this anyway. Well, and that's an interesting point. Because, for example, our 235 is going to take on 260 or 300 horsepower gas engines. And I'll tell you why. You didn't ask the question. I assume that the torque curve is similar to the higher horsepower. Well, it's two things. Right back there is our SR20. It had a 210 horsepower gas engine when we got it. It's got 180 horsepower dump truck. There are 30 horsepower less. We could put a bigger one in, but that's what we had when we put that together. It outperforms the SR20 in virtually every phase of flight. Climbs faster, initial climb. Of course, once you get to altitude, it's turbocharged. Right. And the SR20, it's not. So we have to change the conversation from just horsepower. Because horsepower diesel, horsepower gas, technically they're the same. But it seems like the diesels, you get better performance on them. But then there's more. And this is probably the bigger part of this. An air-cooled engine is very draggy to cool. I've heard numbers from air framers, 25% to 40% of your parasitic drag. And somebody's going to say, oh, that's not true. Numbers I've heard from air framers. I didn't make this number up. OK. But let's be conservative. 25% of your parasitic drag is just used to cool the engine. Because you got to force all that air in through the fins and out the bottom. That's the reason high-performance aircraft got cowl flaps. Because when you get up to altitude, you can reduce drag by having less air going through the engine. Liquid-cooled engines are very aerodynamically and dragly. Dragly? That's not a word, is it? We'll use it. Very low drag to cool. Sure. P-51s, we're now at a P-51. P-51s actually made thrust out of their heat exchangers. It's called pressure recovery. There's a way you can design heat exchangers to actually extract that heat and turn it to thrust. Now, we're not big enough to turn it to thrust. But we can use that to really reduce the drag to cool. So the combination of it's a diesel, and you do have better low-end torque. People will debate how much that really counts. But combined with a much more aerodynamically efficient package is why we really get huge performance gains on top of the diesel itself being more efficient. And you get to altitude, there's turbo charge. So right now, as we're standing here, you mentioned the SR-20. You've got two other aircraft. What is this currently running in and gaining hours on? Getting hours in right now, as we speak, is the SR-20 and the Velocity V-20. So a twin there, OK. The SR-20, we have a lot of hours on, and we've been flying that for a long time. The twin just started. We headed to Oshkosh last year. We've done some upgrades to it. We've done a lot more flying here just recently with it. There's a lot more coming up. Around the corner is an RV-14 installation package. It's not complete. I'm sure you saw it. That will be flying in the next few months. And we have a lot of interest from the Vans community. All right, so the other thing other than weight, let's talk about price. And obviously, you know, that changes. So we are at the show 2024 at Oshkosh. What are we looking at for cost of the engine? Well, and I'm going to give you, again, another two-part question or two-part answer. We don't sell the engines loose at this point in time. We sell installation packages. Because what would you do with it as a builder? Yeah. OK, so what we do is we have, besides our engine engineering team, we have an aircraft integration team, airspace engineers, ANP. You have to at this point because it's not in anything, right? And so we have installation packages, basically, firewall forward. I guess it's a velocity. It's a firewall in a word, but you know what I mean, which is the engine mount, the engine, the isolators, filters, pumps, all the heat exchangers. Basically, everything you need. And the calling, because we do custom-designed calling. We do a lot of analysis to make sure that it's thermally efficient, aerodynamically efficient. Sure. No, it's an awesome design. I've seen some of your animations online. And how you solve certain problems is really pretty awesome. Yeah. So that's why I want to come out and talk to you guys about your product here. So as you're progressing, as it's getting into more and more airframes out there, I would assume you have some type of social media presence that we can follow you to see all this cool stuff. And so where can we find you online and so forth? Well, first of all, DeltaHawk.com is a great place to start. We have a lot of information there. And also what we're doing is, if you go there, we have a survey, a vote. If you go to DeltaHawk.com, we say, what kind of airframe would you like for us to build an installation kit for? And we have like, I don't know, 1,100 entries, 1,100 people responded. Okay. And the results are online, what people are asking for. Sure. So that gives people an idea of where we're going to go. But it's also a way to get people's voice into what the interest is. But that's obviously one. We have Instagram. We have Facebook. You just look for us at DeltaHawk. So, you know, we're on all the normal. Well, we have a YouTube channel as well. Okay. We'll be looking for that. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes here to describe and tell about the engineering in this. And appreciate being part of the Engine Week series this year. No problem. I appreciate your time. Thank you to our patrons over on Patreon and 1010 in our co-pilot status. If you feel like supporting us, check us out on patreon.com. And if you are new here, welcome. You are invited right now to subscribe, like this video, and hit that bell so you don't miss a single episode.