earthmover17
New Member
It is a given that the aftercoolers on these engines are the weak link. While pondering this weekend about this I thought I might research the possibility of building a seperate cooling system just for the aftercooler.
The way I think this would work would be to use a seperate pump and heat exchanger and use antifreeze thru the aftercooler instead of sea water. It would seem to me if you had a closed system you would be able to moniter the level of the antifreeze to watch for a cooler failure. As it is now if the cooler fails you don't know it until catastropic failure of the engine. I would much rather ingest antifreeze than seawater if I lost an aftercooler.
I don't profess to be smarter than Cat engineers but there should be a solution for the 3196's aftercoolers failure other than replacing the engines once they leak.
Ideally cooling the fresh induction air with air would be my choice but I can't seem to put that together in my head. It would also take a different aftercooler which I don't know if Cat offers one.
Any thoughts?
Jack
The way I think this would work would be to use a seperate pump and heat exchanger and use antifreeze thru the aftercooler instead of sea water. It would seem to me if you had a closed system you would be able to moniter the level of the antifreeze to watch for a cooler failure. As it is now if the cooler fails you don't know it until catastropic failure of the engine. I would much rather ingest antifreeze than seawater if I lost an aftercooler.
I don't profess to be smarter than Cat engineers but there should be a solution for the 3196's aftercoolers failure other than replacing the engines once they leak.
Ideally cooling the fresh induction air with air would be my choice but I can't seem to put that together in my head. It would also take a different aftercooler which I don't know if Cat offers one.
Any thoughts?
Jack
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