Engine Cooling Systems

It stands to reason that if you fill a metal engine with fuel and air hundreds of times a second and make it explode, the whole thing is going to get pretty hot. To stop it all from melting into a fused lump of steel and aluminium, all engines have some method of keeping them cool.

Air cooling

You don't see this much on car engines at all now. The most famous cars it was used on were rear-engined boxers like the original VW Beetle, Karmann Ghia, and Porsche Roadsters. It is still used a lot on motorbike engines because it's a very simple method of cooling. For air cooling to work, you need two things - fins (lots of them) and good airflow. An air-cooled engine is normally easy to spot because of the fins built into the outside of the cylinders. The idea is simple - the fins act as heat sinks, getting hot with the engine but transferring the heat to the air as the air passes through and between them. Air-cooled engines don't work particularly well in long, hot traffic jams though, because obviously there's very little air passing over the fins. They are good in the winter when the air is coldest, but that illustrates a weak spot in the whole design. Air cooled engines can't regulate the overall temperature of the cylinder heads and engine, so the temperature tends to swing up and down depending on engine load, air temperature and forward speed. A famous problem with air-cooling is associated with V-twin motorcycles. Because the rear cylinder is tucked in the frame behind the front cylinder, its supply of cool, uninterrupted air is extremely limited and so in these designs, the rear cylinder tends to run extremely hot compared to the front.

The image on the right is ©Ducati and shows the engine from the Monster 695 motorbike. It's a good example of modern air-cooled design and you can see the fins on the engine are all angled towards the direction of travel so the air can flow through them freely.

Oil cooling

To some extent, all engines have oil-cooling. It's one of the functions of the engine oil - to transfer heat away from the moving parts and back to the sump where fins on the outside of the sump can help transfer that heat out into the air. But for some engines, the oil system itself is designed to be a more efficient cooling system. BMW 'R' motorbikes are known for this (their nickname is 'oilheads'). As the oil moves around the engine, at some points it's directed through cooling passageways close to the cylinder bores to pick up heat. From there it goes to an oil radiator placed out in the airflow to disperse the heat into the air before returning into the core of the engine. Actually, in the case of the 'R' motorbikes, they're air- and oil-cooled as they have the air-cooling fins on the cylinders too. For a quick primer on how the radiator itself works, read on....

Water cooling

This is by far and away the most common method of cooling and engine down. With water cooling, a coolant mixture is pumped around pipes and passageways inside the engine separate to the oil, before passing out to a radiator. The radiator itself is made of metal, and it forces the coolant to flow through long passageways each of which have lots of metal fins attached to the outside giving a huge surface area. The coolant transfers its heat into the metal of the radiator, which in turn transfers the heat into the surround air through the fins - essentially just like the air-cooled engine fins. The coolant itself is normally a mixture of distilled water and an antifreeze component. The water needs to be distilled because if you just use tap water, all the minerals in it will deposit on the inside of the cooling system and mess it up. The antifreeze is in the mix, obviously to stop the liquid from freezing in cold weather. If it froze up, you'd have no cooling at all and the engine would overheat and weld itself together in a matter of minutes. The antifreeze mix normally also has other chemicals in it for corrosion resistance too and when mixed correctly it raises the boiling point of water, so even in the warmer months of the year, a cooling system always needs a water / antifreeze mix in it.

The coolant system in a typical car is under pressure once the engine is running, as a byproduct of the water pump and the expansion that water undergoes as it heats up. Because of the coolant mixture, the water in the cooling system can get over 100°C without boiling which is why it's never a good idea to open the radiator cap immediately after you've turned the engine off. If you do, a superheated mixture of steam and coolant will spray out and you'll spend some quality time in a burns unit.

The complexities of water cooling. Water cooling is the most common method of cooling and engine down, but it's also the most complicated. For example you don't want the coolant flowing through the radiator as soon as you start the engine. If it did, the engine would take a long time to come up to operating temperature which causes issues with the emissions systems, the drivability of the engine and the comfort of the passengers. In truly cold weather, most water cooling systems are so efficient that if the coolant flowed through the radiator at startup, the engine would literally never get warm. So this is where the thermostat comes in to play. The thermostat is a small device that normally sits in the system in-line to the radiator. It is a spring-loaded valve actuated by a bimetallic spring. In layman's terms, the hotter it gets, the wider open the valve is. When you start the engine, the thermostat is cold and so it's closed. This redirects the flow of coolant back into the engine and bypasses the radiator completely but because the cabin heater radiator is on a separate circuit, the coolant is allowed to flow through it. It has a much smaller surface area and its cooling effect is nowhere near as great. This allows the engine to build up heat quite quickly. If you look at the first of the two diagrams on the right, you can see the representation of the coolant flow in a cold engine.

As the coolant heats up, the thermostat begins to open and the coolant is allowed to pass out to the radiator where it dumps heat out into the air before returning to the engine block. Once the engine is fully hot, the coolant is at operating temperature and the thermostat is permanently open, redirecting almost all the coolant flow through the radiator. If you look at the second of the two diagrams on the right, you can see the representation of the coolant flow in a cold engine.

It's the action of the thermostat that allows a water-cooled engine to better regulate the heat in the engine block. Unlike an air-cooled engine, the thermostat can dynamically alter the flow of coolant depending on engine load and air temperature to maintain an even temperature.

The radiator fan. In the good old days, car radiators had belt-driven fans that spun behind the radiator as fast as the engine was spinning. The fan is there to draw the warm air away from the back of the radiator to help it to work efficiently. The only problem with the old way of doing it was that the fan ran all the time the engine was running, and stopped when the engine stopped. This meant that the radiator was having air drawn through it at the same rate in freezing cold conditions as it was on a hot day, and when you parked the car, the radiator basically cooked because it had no airflow while it was cooling down. So nowadays, the radiator fan is electric and is activated by a temperature sensor in the coolant. When the temperature gets above a certain level, the fan comes on and because it's electric, this can happen even once you've stopped the engine. This is why sometimes on a hot day, you can park up, turn off, and hear the radiator fan still going. It's also the reason there are big stickers around it in the engine bay because if you park and open the hood to go and start messing with something, the fan might still come on and neatly separate you from your fingers.

The cabin heater. Most water-cooled car engines actually have a second, smaller radiator that the coolant is allowed to flow through all the time for in-car heating. It's a small heat-exchanger in the air vent system. When you select warm air with the heater controls, you will either be allowing the coolant to flow through that radiator via an inline valve in the cooling system (the old way of doing it) or moving a flap to allow the warm air already coming off that radiator to mix in with the cold air from outside.

It's all these combinations and permutations of plumbing in a water-cooled engine that make it so relatively complex. The rendering below shows the basic elements a water-cooled engine.