We like to think our generators have some of the most reliable and efficient diesel engines in the market at the moment. We source our sets from Atlas Copco, they’re a global leader in the generator industry with over 130 years’ experience and they have never let us, or our customers down. Still, that doesn’t stop us admiring other diesel engines like the enormous Wartsila-Sulzer RT – flex 96C, the largest and most powerful diesel engine in use at the moment. So much so we wanted to share a few facts about this monster, read on and prepared to be wowed!
- It’s massive: This two-stroke diesel stands at over 13.5 meters high and it’s an amazing 26 meters long. That’s over 85 feet in length and 44 feet high and anything this size is sure to produce an awful lot of power.
- It’s heavy: If you could pop the engine on a monster set of scales it would peak at 2, 300 tonnes. That’s a heavy engine, but it’s not surprising really when you consider it produces an amazing 80, 080 kW of power. When you consider a typical generator engine produces around 2000 to 3000 watts of power it kind of puts things into perspective.
- It lives in a big ship: Yep, the 96C sits inside a massive container ship named the Emma Maersk, built in a Danish shipyard and put into service in 2006. It was one of the largest container ships at the time and still looks just as impressive today.
- It’s big and it doesn’t smoke: One of the amazing features of this mega engine is thanks to the common-rail system the power plant doesn’t smoke, regardless of the operating speed. It’s designed to be fuel efficient too and provides lower operating speeds which improves manoeuvring.
- And it converts heat back to energy: Big is clever it would seem, because this record breaking engine actually converts up to 50% of the heat generated back to fuel using a turbine-driven generator. Naturally, we had to get a generator in at some point. However, we can’t fail to be impressed by the wonderful Wartsila, it really is a sight for sore eyes!
