Attempting to create a 100 RPS engine

[ElemethSigma]

So I've been experimenting with the small and medium engines, attempting to create one that can run at maximum RPS. I have ran into two problems:

The small engine overheats and explodes after exceeding 22 RPS no matter how many radiators I run the coolant through. Is there a more efficient way to cool a small engine?

The medium engine maxes out around 38.5 RPS, I can't get it to go higher because air intake drops to 77%, even with fluid pumps attached which I would imagine should pull in more air. I have thought about using fan intakes but I don't even know if those would work with non-jet mechanics.

Any ideas?

[FurBall]

I've gotten the best cooling results from pumping seawater directly through the engine. You'll get higher flow if you run thing in parallel, not in series.

Edit:
This only applies if you're making a seafaring vessel. If you're not, then plumbing a ton of radiators in parallel should help.

[Ra-Ra-Rasputin]

A series of radiators functionally doesn't do really anything if the cooled fluid pumped in is already at environment temperature after the first, or two.

As Furry_Freak said, the better scenario in most high cooling needs is parallel deployment, because you're far more interested in flow rate than high impact cooling. Parallel and/or segmented flow allows a very high throughput with relatively good efficiency, back when i tested limits of the engines, i could get an aircraft engine (then renamed to medium engine) to stay relatively stable at 65 RPS and ca. 100 degrees until it chewed through about 3000 litres of fuel.

That all being said, there's really no benefit to running the engines above 20RPS as they are. The fuel usage is absolutely absurd at even 20 RPS for any given engine. A 65 RPS medium engine will chew through 3000 liters of fuel in very few minutes.

[Host]

Coolant does not necessarily reach ambient temperature after just one or two radiators. I mean it presumably depends on the engine temperature, but I know that sometimes at least 5 radiators (in series) are necessary to prevent overheating. That's with pumps between the radiators, as that makes a significant improvement compared to radiators without pumps.

Parallel cooling shouldn't be any better than serial because you have the same bottleneck of a single pipe into and out of the engine. The main factor affecting flow rate is whether you're using additional pumps or not. If anything, parallel could be worse because fluid flow could be disturbed in T-pipes (although this is probably not simulated, at least not intentionally, yet).

If you were seeing better results with parallel then it's probably because of this bug: http://mcro.org/issues/view_issue/16167 (build order can have major effect on performance)

There's also this more general bug: http://mcro.org/issues/view_issue/5755 See the last comment about the danger of adding water tanks to your cooling loop as well!

[Ra-Ra-Rasputin]

With parallel cooling you have a significant amount of flow pushed through the engine, which means that the coolant doesn't heat as much, which in turn means that it isn't in need of as much cooling. The parallel cooling is just there to slow down the flow rate through the radiators by splitting the flow

[Host]

Originally posted by Ra-Ra-Rasputin:

With parallel cooling you have a significant amount of flow pushed through the engine, which means that the coolant doesn't heat as much, which in turn means that it isn't in need of as much cooling. The parallel cooling is just there to slow down the flow rate through the radiators by splitting the flow

How does serial or parallel have any effect on flow through the engine? The engine should pump the same amount of coolant whether the radiators are in serial or parallel.

[Ra-Ra-Rasputin]

Let's say you're pumping 1 liter a second through an engine. Radiators operate based on expelling the heat of the liquid that passes through them, but they need time to do this. If you have 10 radiators in parallel, the flow rate through the radiators is one tenth of that which passes through the engine, making each more effective.

Since the flow rate through the engine is high, the liquid doesn't have time to heat up very much, so the need for cooling isn't as great as with a slower flow.