“The EMD E 23 B 710 Series engines has achieved US EPA Tier 4 Final Certification and we are applying for IMO III certification.”
The Interlake Steamship Company announced yesterday the construction of the first US flagged Great Lakes bulk carrier since 1983. It will be powered by a pair of these Tier 4 certified EMD 16-710 engines. Will these have to use DEF after-treatment (Something refu
To my knowledge this was never a particularly difficult problem. Not only is there relatively adequate space for the necessary apparatus, but the duty cycle for most marine service seldom if ever requires operation producing the ‘outlying’ conditions that caused the locomotive installations to fail testing (I don’t remember the actual details, but they weren’t difficult to find on the Web).
As it turns out there is a rather substantial silver lining in the adoption of DEF in diesel engines: since the approach can knock down substantially all the NOx that would have been emitted by the engine, there is no point in retaining the idiot modifications up to now that have been taken to reduce NO formation in engine operation. So we can go back to high charge pressure, much hotter peak chamber pressures, no stupid and hard-to-maintain EGR … all the things that make a diesel engine run more effectively and fuel-efficiently … and not only have a better and much more reliable engine but perhaps compensate for a significant amount of the DEF bill with the fuel savings.
Perhaps the industry whiners about the costs of DEF are hoping to get the Government to ‘fund the mandate’ (at least, in part) of adopting DEF on freight railroads. That might explain why more hasn’t been done to actually optimize things from an engineering standpoint…
Heh, I was going to post this same thread. Read the E23 specs. It’s DEF. Which, at this point is fine. http://s7d2.scene7.com/is/content/Caterpillar/CM20170712-52832-51137 The specific Apparatus pictures is quite large. It also notes that it’s “Proven Caterpillar SCR components” I hope they don’t mean the same systems as on the F125 locomotive which were proven…to not work right initially.
Be advised this is a PDF download, and you may have no warning or feedback from your browser about this: just a blank page that doesn’t seem to produce anything. Repeatedly clicking will happily download multiple 1.4MB copies!
Just click once and look in your downloads folder.
I’m resurrecting an old thread I just learned of via a link in another thread in this forum.
I posted some CAD layouts on my Flickr page showing work I directed starting in August 2010 when I was hired back to EMD to design a locomotive around the best information at that time as to what it would take to make the 710 Tier 4 compliant. As the layouts show, this huge aftertreatment system, consisting of a Diesel Oxidation Catalyst (DOC) and Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) requiring Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF), as well as an EGR system, was believed to be necessary to meet Tier 4. At this time, EMD had spent little effort in testing this arrangement, only having built some test applications of the EGR system into some UP locos. The plan was to build a mule of this complete system but it hadn’t been done yet to know exactly what was required, but engineering management wanted to see if this could be feasibly fit into a locomotive.
Working with a terrific CAD designer, we made an arrangement that worked but it wasn’t pretty. The loco is 30" longer than a SD70ACe and incorporates an integral fuel tank that allows the engine to be depressed into the top of the fuel tank which let us meet the clearance diagram we were working to. The engine included a new design oil pan that was extended under the alternator to allow for the isolation of the engine/alternator assembly on rubber mounts, eliminating the need for the isolated cab. (This feature was carried over to the 1010J arrangement.) The Flickr page is here:
I started work on this project on the same day that Progress Rail/Caterpillar took over EMD from the investment company that had bought it from GM so any help from CAT had not started yet.
Looking at the marine 710 application in the link above shows the size and the components needed to meet
Since it originally was behind my creation of this thread, I thought it worth noting that Interlake Steamship’s Mark W. Barker is in the final stages of fitting out and should be undergoing sea trials later this spring.
When she enters service early this summer or late spring, she’ll be the first US flagged Great Lakes freighter to enter service in almost 40 years.
The pictures of her in Drydock across from the Blough and then pictures of the SS Badger in the same drydock a month later are very comparatively interesting. SHe’s not the biggest by a long shot.
Also, it’s so weird in 2022 to think of these major industrial manufacturing things happening in Sturgeon bay, gateway to Chicagoan’s northern playground.
The Sturgeon Bay shipyard is now owned by an Italian company, Fincantieri. They also own another yard in Marinette, WI, that has built the LCS and soon will be building the new USN FREMM frigates. It’s a big outfit. The ships the size of the Mark Barker are more versatile than the 1000ft boats.