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What happened to SMA Diesel engines company ?

SMA Diesel engines company’s website is a black hole.
No mentions of C182 Turbo certification issues, no STC in the pipe…
Strange way of managing a business.
Any ideas of what happened?
Would Textron/Lycoming buy them from Safran group to catch up with Technify/Continental/Centurion?
This could be the reason why Textron/Cessna isn’t cancelling C182 JT-A plans despite certification problems.

Last Edited by Nestor at 19 Dec 05:47
LFLY, France

That Avweb link contains this

" In Austria, Austro just announced delivering its 1000th AE300"

Where have 1000 engines gone? Has Diamond really shipped 500 DA42s with these engines?

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Where have 1000 engines gone?

Austro delivered them to Diamond and now they are waiting there on the shelf …

EDxx, Germany

That’s what I thought.

That’s going to be a lot of engines gradually rusting on the shelf.

Lyco engines have a shelf life limit of 1 year, though AFAIK there are multiple preservation options.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

That’s going to be a lot of engines gradually rusting on the shelf.

An engine doesn’t just rust by itself. Three components are needed: Electrolyte (Water + salt/ions), oxygen (dissolved in the electrolyte) and a corrosion cell (anode, catode) within this electrolyte. Take away any one of those three components and there will be no rust. The easiest is to remove the electrolyte of course, and the engine will last forever.

The elephant is the circulation
ENVA ENOP ENMO, Norway

An engine doesn’t just rust by itself. Three components are needed: Electrolyte (Water + salt/ions), oxygen (dissolved in the electrolyte) and a corrosion cell (anode, catode) within this electrolyte. Take away any one of those three components and there will be no rust. The easiest is to remove the electrolyte of course, and the engine will last forever.

IMHO, removing the said electrolyte from the Earth’s atmosphere would be quite a significant civil engineering project

It would improve the weather a great deal, however.

Seriously: are these engines shipped in hermetically vacuum-sealed packages, with the air inside dried to RH=0, or purged with some dry gas e.g. nitrogen from a cylinder? Lyco/Conti certainly are not. Rumours are that WW2 Merlin engines were preserved by filling totally with oil (and rumours are that dozens of them are in places like India, in the original crates) but I have not seen that as an option with current stuff.

Anyway, this looks like yet another aero diesel creative accountancy experiment, this time using the old practice of shipping a load of stuff to (what is in effect) a reseller/distributor and booking it as a sale.

Still, one needs to see the bright side… they are probably not hacking the ECU firmware to detect when the engine has been running at a constant power setting for more than X seconds

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

IMHO, removing the said electrolyte from the Earth’s atmosphere

The “technology” of creating a non condensing room with a minimal of salt and ions around is not exactly rocket science. I mean, there is no problems involved preserving technical equipment for decades. The military does this all the time. Doing this for commercial appliances like engines for for small aircraft instead of producing when needed, does sound like a lot of money up front, but maybe it will reduce the cost per unit ?

The elephant is the circulation
ENVA ENOP ENMO, Norway

Until today engines are stored by topping them up with conservation oil. Stored like that in a average dry place they don’t rust at all.

Until today engines are stored by topping them up with conservation oil. Stored like that in a average dry place they don’t rust at all.

Which engines and where?

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Used or new aircraft or expensive car engines, all over the world. I have seen many engines conserved like that. No serial numbers, sorry ;-)

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