21 Comments Posted by Zorb

Looks contemporary.

This picture would be good in a larger size.

@ Wanderer: this isn't a Kirkbride-design building, either.

One of those looks like an old 25 pair breakout with 66 block. Looks like the other boxes are a covered phone connection and a power connection.

@Chief Johannes:
No, not common rail at all. Common rail is where all injectors are piezoelectric or high speed solenoid high pressure units mounted along a single rail carrying generally over 1000 bar (+14000 psi) pressure. The advantages are that the faster acting piezo injector can use a technique called pilot injection to begin combustion with a limited portion of the fuel before adding the balance of the amount for the cycle. The result is a smoother combustion with some reduction in noise. One simple effect of that is the clatter sound of a common rail engine being a lot less pronounced than a conventional diesel with poppet or unit injectors. A more important effect is that because of the smoother and more controllable combustion characteristics of common rail engines, percussive stress on the bottom end of the engine is drastically reduced. This reduction in stress allows more fuel to be burned (and more power to be produced) with a given size and weight of piston, wrist pin, connecting rod, and crankshaft.
The other advantage of the common rail technology is that the piezo injector valve can switch at a higher fuel pressure, delivering the fuel through a tighter nozzle which atomizes it better, leading to more complete fuel combustion and thus more power out of a given amount of fuel (efficiency!)

This engine does seem to have a single rail fuel distribution manifold which appears to feed individual accumulators for each injector, which would then be driven off of a cam shaft in the engine. This technology is called Unit Injection. This is a reference to how each injector works as an independent unit, developing its own pressure. Distribution rail pressure would be only an amount sufficient to ensure that the unit injectors are not starved of fuel, and would be provided by a gear driven (or possibly electric, though rare) fuel pump.

The principal difference would be that the pressure of the rail is different by at least a factor of 1000, and the injectors on the common rail are electrically fired, not mechanical and cam driven.

Common Rail has just recently found its way into marine applications, including some pretty big stuff, like the Wartsila-Sulzer RTFlex96C, which is the successor to the unit injected RTA96C. The 12RTFlex96C (12 inline) works at around 100 RPM and if I remember correctly has displacement of 1.8 million cubic centimeters per cylinder and power of around 90000 HP. Its family was, as of when I read about if a few years ago, the most efficient internal combustion engine in the world, exceeding 40%. It's also approximately as big as a house. Now find me one of those engines and photograph that!

@neogeo:
Every two child did, I will...

I can see you.

@StL Girl:
It is frequently used by "overclockers", a subset of the enthusiast community that enjoy using technological methods to extract higher level of performance from hardware (through increase in clock generator frequencies) than would normally be provided by said hardware. Initially, it was in the name of saving money - such as the 300 MHz Celeron A processor, which could be run at 450 MHz by simply changing its front side bus frequency from 66 to 100 MHz, and required no special cooling at all.

Most "overclocks" are not nearly so simple in modern hardware. In fact, many of the said group spend more money on exotic cooling technologies than they would have spent had they bought a faster (and more stable) processor to begin with. I have seen multi-hundred dollar water cooling rigs to run a $260 Core i7 2666MHz processor at 3400 or so MHz, when you could have had the true 3400 i7 for about $700 to start with.

/dev/ttys20 (at least)

I'll take the red pill, oops - door...

@Rick: This is exactly the sort of behavior that will make most people here sick. If you used to do this stuff but have since grown up and out of it years age, just don't even tell us - we don't want to know.

Screwing with the rent-a-cops, fine. I'm not above that myself.

Removing things from the fallout shelters just to throw them is disgusting. Do you know what a find an intact (or even largely intact) fallout shelter would be? Throwing blocks off the roof is dumb and dangerous. Finding crap like that is just what it takes to get security tightened up.

Sounds like your freezer doesn't freeze.

So, is the lonely air compressor the power plant equivalent of the lonely chair? I have seen 2 or 3 of them so far in your power plant photos.

I wonder what it was actually drawn with...

Or maybe it's not drawn conventionally and it's just discoloration of something else (oil or something) by time and light, making an old secret drawing visible.

But you can smoke!