Cummins releases first gas engine

[slacktide_bitog]

Interesting that the Cummins gasser is DOHC and not OHV/pushrod

 

[Rust_Belt_Pete]

"delivering diesel-like performance and reliability"

Yeah no. That is going to be a no for me. One of the biggest things about diesels is the fuel type itself. With DI gasoline we are back to washing out rings and oil with gasoline and expensive engine with short life span.

 

[Exhaustgases]

If they desire an electronic fuel system, it should be throttle body injection, no DI.
TB worked just great for a car that got 50 MPG, and never a dilution problem or valve cleaning needed.

 

[Rust_Belt_Pete]

No port injection is better in most cases.

 

[SwampSurvivor]

I was wondering when someone would put a turbo on a gas engine and use it commercially. Ford was one of the first to reintroduce gas medium duty buy sticking in the 6.8 in the 750s and 650s.

Was getting gas and an up fitted, new school bus was gassing up next to me. Asked the driver what was under the hood and why gas. V10 Ford gas and reliability was all that mattered. Bus is used to shuttle miners to a new gold mine 2 hours north of the city, might see - 40F at times.
Perfect candidate for this new Cummins engine.

They're real popular for buses. I have friends who have worked at bus garages and every one is the same - just a complete nightmare with the modern emissions diesels. School bus, delivery truck, ambulance just is not compatible with diesel emissions systems.

A lot of bus fleets are ford powered ( triton v10, godzilla) and there's a company that makes a punched out 8.1 and offers that in buses.

All the local medium duty UPS trucks are Ford gas powered. It's just getting more and more popular due to the complete disaster that modern emissions diesels are.

 

[nthach]

Keep in mind that Cummins has been making LNG/CNG engines for over 30 years. Ever see the UPS tractors with frosted over fuel tanks, those are LNG engines. Many of the school busses here have Cummins LNG engines.

I suspect this new gas engine will be very good from the start because of the experience Cummins has with LNG.

A lot of transit buses doing hard time on the streets of LA, NYC and Dallas are also using Cummins ISL xNG Near Zero engines. And a lot of Waste Management’s fleet is also running Cummins xNG L/M/X engines too.

 

[nthach]

They're real popular for buses. I have friends who have worked at bus garages and every one is the same - just a complete nightmare with the modern emissions diesels. School bus, delivery truck, ambulance just is not compatible with diesel emissions systems.

I talked to a local transit bus mechanic and he told me DPF/SCR also doesn’t play nice with transit buses, they call in someone to clean the DPFs but this agency does have buses make commuter/deadhead runs on the freeway so they’ll have a chance to do a passive regen.

Long Beach and LA/Orange County/San Diego tried to run gasoline-electric hybrid buses. It was a New Flyer 40-60’ bus using the Ford 6.8L V10, a Siemens series hybrid drive system and a bank of super capacitors on the roof. It wasn’t a success. ISE who built the drivetrain went out of business, Long Beach Transit took on Orange County and San Diego’s gas-electric buses. They actually move quick for a bus, not as quick as a BEV or FCEV but more swift than a diesel/CNG one.

 

[Hohn]

I suspect most components are the same.

The torque race has forced Cummins to strengthen and increase heat tolerance of many components of these engines. Those improvements certainly benefit the marine and trucking engines. It would be more expensive to maintain multiple designs instead of one design that all uses can benefit from.. My opinion.

It is more expensive, but the cost of proliferation is easily justified in many cases.

For example, when I was working on the 2010 X15, the higher 600hp rating had all kinds of tweaks vs the lower 450hp rated versions of the same engine-- the water pump was higher capacity and driven at a higher ratio, or example.


Cummins has been working on "fuel agnostic" engines for awhile now. This idea is an engine that can run on whatever fuel you happen to have-- gasoline, ethanol, methanol, diesel, etc.

It's a nightmare for calibrations to get the engine to know how to mix and match different fuels (at the same time!). I've worked on projects to get diesel engine to be "dual fuel" with natural gas or with methanol (in addition to diesel) and it's amazingly complex and expensive.

Having seen firsthand how extraordinarily difficult it can be to have only one additional fuel, multiple fuels is super challenging.

Being in the larger industrial products area, I don't have much insight into what the small engine counterparts are doing these days, but I heard some good things in the internal hubbub around this new "Octane" engine.

 

[Hohn]

I talked to a local transit bus mechanic and he told me DPF/SCR also doesn’t play nice with transit buses, they call in someone to clean the DPFs but this agency does have buses make commuter/deadhead runs on the freeway so they’ll have a chance to do a passive regen.

Not only that, but the duty cycle is murder on turbocharger fatigue. That poor turbo is blitzed up to speed, yanked back down, then blitzed back up to speed. And it does it thousands of times per shift.

Many Cummins engines in buses have unique turbochargers with special wheels that make them more fatigue resistant.