Author Topic: Mechanical water pump ideas?  (Read 11958 times)

BruceM

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Mechanical water pump ideas?
« on: March 20, 2016, 03:15:55 PM »
We've found that my initial design for cooling, thermosiphon for coolant flow and thermal chimney for air through the radiator is inadequate for extended runs at full load.  From some experiments with increasing the stack height and modest fan on the radiator, it seems our water flow is inadequate.  We are getting 54 degrees of cooling on the return water, but still engine temperature very slowly climbs. Raising the radiator more would do it but then our thermal chimney for the radiator gets even taller, which is a structural issue for high winds.

I'm looking into options for a water pump. A mechanically driven by a rubber roller or vee belt off the flywheel would be lovely; it could also let me lower the radiator, increasing the vertical for the thermal chimney.  Any suggestions on a suitable pump and how to do the bypass so that a thermostat could continue to be used?  

Alternately, can someone suggest a suitable AC pump?  
« Last Edit: March 20, 2016, 03:30:35 PM by BruceM »

buickanddeere

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Re: Mechanical water pump ideas?
« Reply #1 on: March 20, 2016, 06:35:48 PM »
  12V electric that is thermostatically controlled. So it operates only when required.

Horsepoor

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Re: Mechanical water pump ideas?
« Reply #2 on: March 20, 2016, 08:39:34 PM »
I know it is not mechanical but use Grundfos home hot water circulation pumps on each of my listeroids: Cujet and Rocketboy, also run them on each of their engines. Never had one fail, but each of has spares. These can be purchased for around $60 each if you shop and buy two at a time. When set on the lowest possible setting, and circulating water past a thermostat, they do a really nice job.

http://www.supplyhouse.com/Grundfos-59896341-UPS15-58FC-3-Speed-Circulator-Pump-1-25-HP-115-volt-4701000-p

Bruce
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Tom

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Re: Mechanical water pump ideas?
« Reply #3 on: March 21, 2016, 12:53:01 AM »
+1 on the Grundfos pump. Use the same one here with a snap switch, only it circulates the coolant through the hydronic loop to heat our floors.
Tom
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BruceM

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Re: Mechanical water pump ideas?
« Reply #4 on: March 21, 2016, 03:04:02 AM »
Thanks B&D, Bruce, Tom.  Glad to know a 1/25 hp circ pump on low is enough flow.  Can the Grudfos just be left running even with the thermostat closed, or do you have a temperature switch to turn it on/off? 



Hugh Conway

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Re: Mechanical water pump ideas?
« Reply #5 on: March 21, 2016, 07:58:13 PM »
As long as the pump is wet, ok for continuous operation. These last for years. Use one on my solar water heating system as heat exchanger circulator.
Installed many in hydronic heating systems over the years, all still operating w/o replacement or maintenance.
Cheers,
Hugh
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Tom

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Re: Mechanical water pump ideas?
« Reply #6 on: March 21, 2016, 08:23:34 PM »
That's exactly how mine runs.

Another thought, what size are your water hoses and how much height is there to your radiator? Are you running coolant? All these things affect circulation and how much heat can be carried away from the engine.
Tom
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EdDee

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Re: Mechanical water pump ideas?
« Reply #7 on: March 21, 2016, 09:54:12 PM »
Hi Bruce,

I am a proponent of the KISS principle... I looked at forced circulation initially, but found that with a minimum of height on the radiator, hydronic performs flawlessly... Our day temps average between 8 and 40C, the feed/return pipes are around 1" or so, the radiator top is about 300 mm above the head/rocker cover, the hot water flows vertically upward from an elbow on the head then flows horizontally through a heatex before it gets to the radiator top inlet. Even with breaking the rules like this, the main fan on the radiator only turns on when I am pushing around 4kw for an extended period... The radiator bottom connection is about 100 or so mm at a guess above the jacket inlet on the engine....

What I have found, is that by running a small fan on the top section, about a third, of the radiator, controlled by a snap switch at the outlet of the head, the hydronic loop turns over nicely... when the snap switch on the top of the radiator closes, the main fan kicks in and the temp comes down to about 85 or so... The small fan runs virtually continuously, just enough cooling to allow a nice smooth loop to flow... it kicks in at around 85C if I remember, so it allows the engine to warm up quite rapidly... I tossed the Tstat, it was causing more hassle than it was worth...

Oh yes, the radiator is an old radiator that was repurposed out of a scrapped Toyota forklift I think....

Given the option of a more 'controlled' electrical circulation or belt driven system, with a super duper high resolution thermostat..... I wouldn't ..... More bits to go wrong...

Just my 5c worth.... or maybe its not even worth that much!

Cheers
Ed

Edit... sorry piping is 1.5" or whatever the outlet size is on the engine without reducing it.... And one little, but I think critical mod that I did was to open the water inlet on the sleeve to almost full diameter by removing the cast in aperture... That aperture is purposely cast in for 'infinite reservoir' hydronic type scenarios to help with over cooling....
« Last Edit: March 21, 2016, 09:59:30 PM by EdDee »
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BruceM

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Re: Mechanical water pump ideas?
« Reply #8 on: March 21, 2016, 11:53:35 PM »
Thanks for the good info, Ed. My neighbor's radiator is  the same height above the engine as yours, Glort, but we have 3/4" (19mm) hoses.  I think that's a big issue.

My own thermosiphon setup uses 1" and larger hoses, and the top of the radiator is about 3 feet above the engine. It's grossly excessive, and I had to restrict flow to keep the thermostat from cycling, so I downsized for my neighbor's setup.  A master of "too much or too little", I seem to have undershot this time.

We may experiment with a small Laing recirculation pump that I have on hand to see how that affects the performance, and we got some 1" (25mm) ID heater hose to increase the hose size, which may boost the passive performance.

I tend to like thermostat operation because we have huge temperature swings daily, and rather extreme winter variations as well. 


Tom

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Re: Mechanical water pump ideas?
« Reply #9 on: March 21, 2016, 11:57:59 PM »
On mine it was the addition of a valve on the bottom hose that successfully stopped the thermal cycling. It's running 1" hose with the bottom valve almost closed. This is a tank cooled, non-pumped system when the heat's not needed and it does stay cool.
Tom
2004 Ashwamegh 6/1 #217 - ST5 just over 3k hours.

EdDee

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Re: Mechanical water pump ideas?
« Reply #10 on: March 22, 2016, 08:39:13 AM »
Hey Guys,

+1 for Tom's approach, but I was worried about someone "fiddling" the setting on the valve, so I went to the 1/3 + 2/3 Cooling fan setup... I can "see" if the things are working or not...Also +1 with "upgrading" the pipe diameter, in my opinion, do that first...

A rule of thumb: Low Profile radiator or using heat exchanger/restrictions in the coolant path, use biggest piping you can to aid flow, High radiator, you can get away with smaller piping as the thermal mass/coolant density difference gets a bit more forgiving... Also, use the biggest radiator you can find, its easy to block fins or throttle flow to downgrade it, but its a real SOB to make a smaller system work harder, which seems to be happening in your case Bruce... Possibly, just maybe, the upgrading of your pipe size to the largest you can fit would be the easiest to do and solve a lot of your misery...It certainly wouldn't do any harm, and shouldn't be too difficult to implement either... Probably, also, the most viable from an expenditure pov too..If you can, try and get away from the thermostat for the hydronic system, while it works well when it does work, hydronic+Tstat don't like playing together and need a bit, sometimes a lot, of tweaking to get things happy...(again, just my opinion...)...

Back when digital cameras and the internet hadn't even been thought of, I bumped into a farmer who was having a problem with his Lister cooling, his case was that it was cooling too well, it had a crank driven pulley/fan system... He settled on an interesting and unique, but a little tricky solution.... His header tank on his radiator had a large opening.... It was about 4" if i remember correctly... He had a toilet cistern round float attached to a few little levers that controlled a "shutter" on the radiator air side... as the temp increased, the water level rose, the shutter opened, allowing more air through the radiator fins and vice versa... He controlled the temperature of the beast by adding water to the header tank, more water gave more opening on the shutter... Was a cute, but in my opinion, not the best solution, but he developed it and was having fun! (The downside was, if he ran low on coolant, the shutter closed up and made things worse)...

Again I ramble...

Cheers
Ed



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BruceM

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Re: Mechanical water pump ideas?
« Reply #11 on: March 22, 2016, 04:58:40 PM »
Ed, your electric thermostat via two fans is an elegant and simple solution.  We don't have a power source other than a small amount of 12VDC available when only the compressor is in service so I am reluctant to go the electric fan boost route, yet. 

Some of the problem with this new setup for my neighbor is the thermal chimney only air flow.  It restricts air flow for a small boosting fan, like the often used muffin fan.  I really like my exhaust driven induced draft for a "fan" with no moving parts or electronics to fail,  but the utter quiet and filtered exhaust of the earth muffler was chosen for this project.  The 8" diameter, 8 foot tall thermal chimney needs to be enlarged for better air flow.  When there is a steady breeze we have adequate cooling from the suction of the vent cap, but when the wind dies we are marginal.  Right now water flow seems to be the limiter to our performance. We upgraded the Honda Civic radiator to a 3 row model from a single row, which doubled our temperature differential (inlet-outlet) to 54 degrees F.

Thanks, Hugh and Tom for the good info on the circ pump approach.  I have a couple different small 12VDC re-circulation pumps that we do have enough power to use.  Topsflow brushless dc pumps are very low power, quite cheap and are rated for 100C use, so should be OK.  The best pump for less flow restriction when not turned on is the EL-SID, but they are a bit pricey. (I have one spare we can use for testing.) We will have auto shutdown on over-temp in case of cooling system problems.

Like myself, my new neighbor has some neurological damage and is badly effected (headache, confusion, depression) by the strong magnetic fields from the generator head.  Being able to run the compressor only lets him be able to do his own engine checkout and be a lot more independent.  We have switches by the door so that the generator excitation is turned on only when we're ready to depart.  The spark system is fairly well shielding now and is only mildly bothersome for short periods.

A modest recirculation pump with a shaft for a pulley would be marvelous to find, but so far I haven't been able to find one.




Hugh Conway

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Re: Mechanical water pump ideas?
« Reply #12 on: March 22, 2016, 08:31:11 PM »
Just as a comparison, I am using a 10 fin cast iron radiator with a 1 gallon can for an expansion tank. Coolant fittings and hoses are 1 inch. Thermosyphon only, using about 5 or 6 gallons of coolant total. The bottom of the radiator is about a 16" above the engine water "in" port.
This set-up is vastly superior to my previous 30 gallon tank, also thermosyphon. The 30 gal tank never got completely hot, so there was always cool water at the engine "in" port. With this rad, the engine heats up much faster, and then maintains a good steady hot water flow.
I note in another recent thread that the bottom has fallen out of scrap metal prices, so one may find a radiator for a good price these days. Make sure the fins have not been cracked from freezing.  The first one I got did have cracked fins, so was useless. Fortunately it was a freebie!

Lister specified a tank somewhere in the neighbourhood of 50 gallon capacity (Imperial gallons, no doubt!) I suppose one could run flat out in a hot desert with that much liquid to heat up! The thermosyphon/rad combination works very well for me. I will be on the look-out for another rad for my other engine.

And true story, thermosyphon works best with a large diameter flow path and a significant distance between the heat source and the radiator.


Cheers,
Hugh
« Last Edit: March 22, 2016, 11:53:00 PM by Hugh Conway »
JKson 6/1  (Utterpower PMG ) Off-grid
Lister 6/1 Start-O-Matic engine......running with PMG
1978 Royal Enfield (glutton for punishment by Indian iron)
1963 BMW R-27 project

EdDee

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Re: Mechanical water pump ideas?
« Reply #13 on: March 22, 2016, 09:11:34 PM »
Hey Hugh/Bruce,

Hugh, you won't believe this, bit my total coolant capacity before I put on the heatex was a mere 7L... with the heatex, it has upped it by another 1.5L... miniscule compared to the 5/30/50 gal tanks....

One thing I have been very tempted to implement, is a 'duct' that fits between the far side flywheel and the engine casing... duct the swirled air towards and through the radiator, no other fan needed... at first checks, it looks like there will be more than enough air stirred by the big wheel to do the job... Have you heard of this being attempted by anybody before? It looks simple enough, just a bit of creative tin bashing to accomplish....

Bruce, I picked up a car water pump the other day, I think its from a Hyundai Elantra(the car wasn't attached to it)... Shaft driven and pretty much a complete unit, not just a bearing housing that fits into the precast volute in the block... with one small blanking plate with water hose fitting and a single inlet line, it is well suited to lister operation... if you have a local wrecking yard, it might be worthwhile to do a bit of poking round...

Cheers
Ed
12/1 750RPM/9HP Roid 5kVA- WMO Disposal/Electricity & Hot Water Gen
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BruceM

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Re: Mechanical water pump ideas?
« Reply #14 on: March 22, 2016, 10:40:11 PM »
Thanks for the good ideas, Hugh and Ed.  Howling spring winds for the next few days so no cooling experiments; the current setup is more than adequate with wind!

Ed, I looked at the ELANTRA water pump but it is also a bolt into the block unit;
http://www.carparts.com/details/Hyundai/Elantra/Replacement/Water_Pump/2003/REPH313510.html?TID=gglpla&origin=pla&gclid=Cj0KEQjw2sO3BRD49-zdzfb8iLwBEiQAFZgZfAAODdkamO_ANm1qLLBl_JcMwlIB6Btp-bsXzY9XqMIaAmxT8P8HAQ&redirect=1

Perhaps yours is from another model or year?