About 20 years ago in Belvidere, NJ, USA, the Hoffman-LaRoche company installed a stationary Sulzer, smaller, but similar to this one. It was a 10-cyl, 27,000+ HP unit, turning 120 rpm. It had a 3-ft bore and 6-ft stroke. They had serious cylinder-wear problems because the cooling system was part of the plant cooling water system instead of being dedicated to just that engine and they had fuel cleanliness problems for a while until they figured out how to properly run the DeLaval centrifuges that were "cleaning" the #6 fuel oil. There were 3 huge Brown-Bovari turbochargers (6-foot diameter) up on the top deck and one could stand on a cylinder head and feel the combustion taking place under your feet. The fuel injection pumps were the size of a Cat D-8K engine and the fuel injector nozzles were about 6" diameter and 30" long.
Probably the most interesting aspect of this engine was torqueing the cylinder head nuts. The cylinder head was set in place by overhead crane and the cylinder nuts were run down hand-tight. Then a large spider-looking unit was lowered over the whole cylinder head...over each cylinder stud (with the hand-tight nut in place) was a coupler nut, which was run down over the cylinder stud threads sticking up through the head nut. When all of the coupler nuts were in place a Port-a-Power hydraulic unit was fired up and hydraulic tension applied to all the cylinder studs simultaneously, stretching the cylinder studs a proper amount. The head nuts were then run down hand-tight, hydraulic tension on the Port-a-Power was dropped, the coupler nuts unscrewed and the torqueing unit was lifted to the next cylinder...whole process took about 5 minutes.
This engine is gone now, a victim of the NJ DER and bad PR...there was a stack-monitoring unit, hard-wired into the NJ DER in Trenton...the folks in Trenton would look at their meters and if anything looked bad, would write another citation. Eventually this became a bad PR point with the local folks in Belvidere and H-LaR scrapped the engine. This engine, combined with a heat-recovery boiler and various other heat-recovery devices, was running at around 90-95 % efficiency.
I was working for an oil company at the time, suppling lube oil for the crankcase and cylinder oil. To inspect the cylinder walls and look at the piston rings, one would open a hatch on one end of the exhaust manifold and climb inside the manifold with the engine barring controller (to slowly bar the engine over with an electric motor). If doing a quick inspection (with no cool-down time, as was needed for entering the exhaust manifold), one would open a hatch at the bottom of a cylinder intake box and climb up the intake box (wearing a rain-suit becuase of all the black cylinder oil) to inspect rings and cylinder condition.
Swedgemon
GM-90 6/1
