About two years ago a friend and I were pacing a BNSF frieght led by three GE Dash 80s. Engine two (or three) was belching incredible amounts of thick black smoke. It was like a tire fire! The smoke obscured part of the train. All of a sudden flames shot out of the exhaust stack. The flames were about 4 feet in length and lasted about five seconds.
Does anyone out there have any idea what all that was about?
Thanx !
Most likely unburnt fuel meaning major diesel problem.
Something went wrong in a combustion chamber & unburnt fuel is getting into the exhaust where it is getting ignited venting out the exhaust stack.
Gordon
Did that mean a blown engine? The train was still running at good speed ten miles later and there were no more smoke or flames (I guess they could have shut down that engine).
It was tremendously exciting to witness! I think I have video of the black smoke, but not the flames.
Running rich…
The soot in the stack can get red hot,when the turbo dosnt spool up quick enough, or the air/fuel ratio get disturbed for some reason, and the exhaust still has some unburnt fuel left in it, (which is now super hot already) the hot soot can ignight it…some times the older GEs can put on quite a fireworks show.
Ed
notch 5 will start the show notch 6 makes it better.
G’day, Y’all,
In 1955, a huge fire in the Okefenokee Swamp in SE Georgia was started by a diesel engine which had been sitting on a pass track for some time awaiting a meet. The idling diesel built up a layer of soot on the stack so when the engineer wound it up tight to 900 rpm, it sent burning embers into the nearby woods and the fire began. Forest firemen tell me that diesels caused a lot more problems than did steam engines.
But maybe this particular GE was “backing off” on his twin turbo like a race car driver in a 935 turbo Porsche. Flames normally come out of the exhaust pipe. I was watching the television LeMans coverage several years ago and a car with a camera in it was passed by a 935 which then put on the brakes for a turn. Flames poured from the exhaust and the commentator who was watching from a booth somewhere observed that the Porsche must be in trouble. Then the car went around the curve, the driver got on the gas and it disappeared into the distance while the lesser powered camera car accelerated much more slowly.
It sounds to me like that unit lost a turbo and it locked up, therefore starving the engine for air. I’ve changed many a GE turbo for that reason.
For those who have not seen this increadible photo of
a REAL FLAMING UP unit, the UP 9301 departing Laramie WY
here it is:
http://www.mentalfusion.com/erben22/graphichtml/up/up9301.html
Very interestingly this same topic has been discussed recently on both
Railroadforums dot com and SoCalrailfan dot com.
Here is the link to that Railroadforums discussion:
http://www.railroadforums.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6315
That image was originally posted to
the SoCalrailfan Photo Gallery at this URL link.
http://www.socalrailfan.com/photos/showphoto.php?photo=72
Here is another closer view of the offending locomotive the NS 8390:
http://www.socalrailfan.com/photos/showphoto.php?photo=70&cat=500&page=3
Thank you for this very interesting discussion!!
— Daniel
Daniel,
Thanks for the links!! Those are good pictures.
Can you imagine what the officials would say about that,
even back in the ‘steam era’ ?
I know that the C & O engineers were prohibited from making
‘black smoke’ through White Sulpher Springs,WVa.,mainly
because of the Greenbrier Resort there.(in ‘steam days’)
And welcome to the forums,with the rest of us.[#welcome]
We’ve gone over this several times. I’ll try to find a link. As for now, wabash1’s answer is the closest.
Her is my reply to the topic “Flames coming out of diesels” from April 2, 2005.
WWEEELLLL
As for the pictures of smoke and flames posted on several forums of GEs, the blown seal explanation is a bunch of crap! What you are seeing doesn’t happen continuously.
What is happening on the GE’s is that the turbo doesn’t do much thru the 4th notch. There is not enough heat in the exhaust.
Once the throttle goes to number five things start to happen. The more fuel goes in, engine revs higher, there is more heat and the turbo starts to add boost (more air) to make more HP. All of this is supposed to be controled by the engine management system.
Now if the turbo just happens to lag behind so there is not enough air going in, the mixture will be too rich, which equals black smoke. If the injectors happen to dump too much fuel in, this compounds the problem.
So what you are seeing is a real bad case of an OVERLY RICH mixture that first produces great gobs of black smoke, then it gets hot enough to ignite and there is a huge fire out of the stack. Look very closely and you will see that this fire looks very much like you poured fuel on a camp fire. There is no velocity to it like you would find at a much higher notch.
Once the turbo catches up, the mixture returns to normal, the excess fuel burns off and everything is back to normal. As I have said before, this is a rare abnormal occurance that happens on the change from the 4th to the 5th notch. Dash-8s are the worst culprits and I have seen a Dash-9 or two do it, but the Dash-9 event is rarer still.
Big Jim
I have seen EMD units also belch the black smoke during acceleration but never the flame. They must run just enough cooler to be below the ignition point of the fuel.
dd
The older GE,s are most noted for this and it is most often caused by a stuck injector putting to much fuel into the cylinder.
Rodney
Locomotive Engineer
Well this topic seems to come up every few months (search anyone???) , and like said above, too much fuel and not enough air. Most likely cause…turbo lag/ problem.
Adrianspeeder
OK since I am a diesel machinest I have to ad my two cents as to what flames and smoke represent from a diesel. :)
I get asked this question all to many times.
Usually when the flames shoot out it is followed by a thick cloud of black smoke. This is a sign of to rich a air-fuel mixture. This rich mixture allows black ash also know as carbon out the exhaust. This is the portion of the unburned hydorcarbon fuel. Problems such as this means that you could have problems with the injection pump, injection timing, air cleaner or air-to- air system, injectors, or the engine itself. Injectors have a tendancy to add too much fuel if the nozzle is broken off (it will just dump fuel instead of squarting fuel, or if the electronic timming is off. When this occurs the air can’t compensate for the “overdose” in fuel. Also, carbon deposits can occur on the valve head, valve stem, valve seat or on the entire valve. Sometimes when this occurs black smoke in the exhaust will result. So, give this information I must say. . . . . .I love to see fire coming from the exhaust of a GE or any locomotive, it makes a good picture and gives the feeling of power. However, if something like that happens something is seriously worng with the engine, it’s also an envorinmental hazard.
Something else that cropped up recently has to do with the way some of GE’s engines do their injector modulation – I invite people with ‘distinctive competence’ in GE diesel maintenance to correct this with the actual technology used – there’s a crank-angle sensor encoder, probably something like a Hall-effect ring with spaced teeth, that’s used to determine injector timing (among other things). It’s supposedly possible for this to ‘jump time’ by a certain number of teeth, which results in the consistent overfueling either early (quenches the compression heat rise) or late (incomplete mixing or combustion) in the stroke, but on ALL the cylinders… which might account for the dramatic volume of smoke involved in an otherwise “running” engine that doesn’t get shut down by differential cylinder-power detection or some other internal diagnostic. (Note that computer functions that depend only on the number of teeth passing the sensor, e.g. engine rpm, or that are reading differential timing to get relative rotational acceleration/deceleration, as for cylinder-power differential, will probably work just fine if the ring has ‘jumped time’.)
Usually, there is some means by which the encoder periodically provides a second sync signal – a hole and optical sensor, for example, or wider/doubled teeth at reference positions. I would speculate that the method ‘smoky GE’s’ use is one that is physically or logically separate from the system doing pulse counting, and I suspect it is optical and either getting ‘dirted up’ or getting exposed to stray light somewhere…
“Usually when the flames shoot out it is followed by a thick cloud of black smoke.”
Sarah,
In the case we are talking about, the thick, Destroyer Escort like smoke precedes the fire. When the smoke does catch fire, it looks more like a bad B-Movie special effect rather than velocity induced flames from working under heavy load.