page_title: Internal combustion engine cooling
section_title: Air-cooling
hierarchical_section_title: Internal combustion engine cooling / Air-cooling
caption_attribution_description: Air cooled cylinder from a Continental C-85 aviation engine. The engine develops a maximum of 85 bhp and is found on older small light aircraft such as the Cessna 140. The engine has a displacement of 188 cu in. The cylinder is being prepared for fitting to the engine of N140LB, a Cessna 140 built in 1946. Photograph: Dylan Smith (uploader)
context_page_description: Internal combustion engine cooling uses either air or liquid to remove the waste heat from an internal combustion engine. For small or special purpose engines, cooling using air from the atmosphere makes for a lightweight and relatively simple system. Watercraft can use water directly from the surrounding environment to cool their engines. For water-cooled engines on aircraft and surface vehicles, waste heat is transferred from a closed loop of water pumped through the engine to the surrounding atmosphere by a radiator.
  Water has a higher heat capacity than air, and can thus move heat more quickly away from the engine, but a radiator and pumping system add weight, complexity, and cost. Higher-power engines generate more waste heat, but can move more weight, meaning they are generally water-cooled. Radial engines allow air to flow around each cylinder directly, giving them an advantage for air cooling over straight engines, flat engines, and V engines. Rotary engines have a similar configuration, but the cylinders also continually rotate, creating an air flow even when the vehicle is stationary.
  Aircraft design more strongly favors lower weight and air-cooled designs.
context_section_description: Cars and trucks using direct air cooling (without an intermediate liquid) were built over a long period from the very beginning and ending with a small and generally unrecognized technical change. Before World War II, water-cooled cars and trucks routinely overheated while climbing mountain roads, creating geysers of boiling cooling water. This was considered normal, and at the time, most noted mountain roads had auto repair shops to minister to overheating engines.
  ACS (Auto Club Suisse) maintains historical monuments to that era on the Susten Pass where two radiator refill stations remain. These have instructions on a cast metal plaque and a spherical bottom watering can hanging next to a water spigot. The spherical bottom was intended to keep it from being set down and, therefore, be useless around the house, in spite of which it was stolen, as the picture shows.
  During that period, European firms such as Magirus-Deutz built air-cooled diesel trucks, Porsche built air-cooled farm tractors, and Volkswagen became famous with air-cooled passenger cars. In the United States, Franklin built air-cooled engines.
  For many years air cooling was favored for military applications as liquid cooling systems are more vulnerable to damage by shrapnel.
  The Czech Republic–based company Tatra is known for their large displacement air-cooled V8 car engines; Tatra engineer Julius Mackerle published a book on it. Air-cooled engines are better adapted to extremely cold and hot environmental weather temperatures: you can see air-cooled engines starting and running in freezing conditions that seized water-cooled engines and continue working when water-cooled ones start producing steam jets. Air-cooled engines have may be an advantage from a thermodynamic point of view due to higher operating temperature. The worst problem met in air-cooled aircraft engines was the so-called "Shock cooling", when the airplane entered in a dive after climbing or level flight with throttle open, with the engine under no load while the airplane dives generating less heat, and the flow of air that cools the engine is increased, a catastrophic engine failure may result as different parts of engine have different temperatures, and thus different thermal expansions. In such conditions, the engine may seize, and any sudden change or imbalance in the relation between heat produced by the engine and heat dissipated by cooling may result in an increased wear of engine, as a consequence also of thermal expansion differences between parts of engine, liquid-cooled engines having more stable and uniform working temperatures.
caption: A cylinder from an air-cooled aviation engine, a Continental C85. Notice the rows of fins on both the steel cylinder barrel and the aluminum cylinder head. The fins provide additional surface area for air to pass over the cylinder and absorb heat.
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