Common-Rail injection System

Carl Salisbury & the Winton Engine Co?

Tom

Second one is correct.

Peter

-- Peter & Rita Forbes Email: snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk Web:

Well I must admit I was put off by a a GM herring and the date, by 1939-40 several engine makers had been using common rail systems of one sort or another.. But if you want to talk about the first common rail system, I suppose we're talking about the system patented by James McKechnie and adopted by Vickers-Metropolitan?

Tom

Correct. The Winton part wasn't a deliberate red-herring, sorry if it distracted you! :-))

I noticed that the Metropolitan-Vickers name was reversed to what I am used to seeing, any idea when they made the change?

Peter

-- Peter & Rita Forbes Email: snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk Web:

According to "Vickers a History", J D Scott, the name never changed. Vickers sold a controlling interest in 1928 to the International General Electric Co. of the US. Apparently they were well shot of it as it had been a very expensive exercise in company expansion.

A footnote from the book: Metropolitan Vickers then acquired shares in BTH, Edison & Swan Electrical Co Ltd and Fergus Pailin Ltd. In Dec 1928, the was changed to Associated Elactrical Industries Ltd, which became a holding company while the name was kept by the formation of a new company the Metropolitan Vickers Company which in 1962 (which is when the history was published) was a subsidiary of AEI (Manchester)Ltd as it had become.

Tom

The Winton Engine Company (later a corporation) was bought out by GM in the early 1930s. Founded by Alexander Winton, known as the "Father of the American Diesel", the company already had a working relationship with GM and had developed the Winton 201 series as a joint research project.

Winton used air injection on their earlier marine diesels, but by the time my ship's Winton engines were built (1931), they had gone to solid injection using a two cylinder high pressure fuel pump leading to a common rail pipe which had individual stop valves for each injector (very handy when one injector has a problem and you must keep the engine running temporarily for the safety of the ship) and then ending at an accumulator bottle (which dampens fluctuations in pressure when injectors open and close, much like a mechanical version of a capacitor in electronic circuits) and a high-pressure gauge (the ones on my ship are US Gauge Company 10,000 PSI scale) for setting the pressure. There are two levers for controlling speed, one varies the output of the high pressure fuel pump, and the other varies the injector wedge position which varies the duration of injection.

Many of Winton's engines had the fuel pressure automatically controlled but on my ship the pressure must be regulated manually, which is good because I can set optimal pressure for each speed (1/3: 2000PSI, 2/3: 3000PSI, standard (5000 PSI) or hooked-up (5500-6000 PSI). This gives no visible smoke in the exhaust.

I don't know who held the patent (if any) for common rail injection, it was very (excuse the pun) common in that era. Of course, when Winton (in partnership with GM) developed the unit injector, they used them for all their two-stroke designs.

The intersting thing is that one of the "new things" being advertised is a computer-controlled version of common rail using much higher pressures than older systems, which is helping manufacturers to meet the stringent new diesel emissions standards.

Since common-rail injection has virtually no injection lag, it is in my opinion the best system. The fact that my ship's engines have been running using it for 75 years indicates to me that Winton did something right when they chose that system.

Regards, Brian Bailey

P.S. Some Winton engine info link on