ENGINEERING Plastics AND Motorboatmotorsalready go together like ducks and water. Because of their corrosion resistance and ever-improving structural capabilities, plastic materials have taken the spot of metal in components both in and out of the engine compartment. Just consider the newest minn kota from Mercury Marine for the lesson in all of the that plastic materials can perform. The company's 225 to 275 horsepower, six-cylinder Verado motors, the very first supercharged four-stroke models inside their class, make use of polymers for their air-intake manifolds, cam covers, motor control unit housings, resonators, plenums that assist reduce engine during idle, and the majority of of their fuel modules. Three surpasses One Maritime engine covers long ago went into plastic materials, mostly single-piece types produced from sheet shaping compound (SMC) or thermoformed sheet. Verado's new motor enclosure, by contrast, includes three injection-molded plastic cowls. The topmost cowl sticks out because of its sheer size. Produced from a 33-percent glass-filled nylon 66, this part measures 33.5 X 22.9 X 16.4 inches and weighs 11.3 lbs. Mercury plastic materials engineer Mitesh Sheth calls it the "largest injection-molded cosmetic nylon part on earth," claims that DuPont Engineering Polymers, the content supplier, confirms. A structural rear cowl created from the identical nylon mates together with the top cowl along a diagonal split line and attaches with an aluminum structural member that joins the engine for the motorboat. A smaller front cowl molded from two pieces of glass- and mineral-filled DuPont Minlon nylon completes the upper motor housing. A few other molded plastic parts go into the cowl assembly. A PC/PBT air dam cap, which channels air in to the engine, attaches to the top cowl. As well as the rear cowl features a separately molded nylon 66 structural rib that Mercury attaches by using a urethane adhesive. Finally, the Verado sports a lower cowl to protect the drive shaft housing. Though it's mostly conventional in the style, Mercury engineers chose to mold this lower cowl out from a DuPont Sorlyn ionomer, a type of thermoplastic recognized for its capability to support high-gloss, molded-colored. The whole assembly might seem a little complex initially. After all, maritime engine top cowlings have until recently had simple, single-piece shapes. John Zebley, Mercury's director of model, goes up to now with regards to describe these earlier types as "inverted trash cans by using a seal." Yet using injection molded plastics and splitting the cowl into pieces worked to Mercury's advantage in a number of ways. Reducing cost is a big one. Sheth explains that this nylon components can reach a category A finish with less paint than the SMC parts. "They have fewer defects, like orange peel, which increases our yields," he states. And also the lower cowls, making use of their molded-in color, don't need any paint whatsoever. Sheth estimates that these particular paint line savings give rise to a roughly 46- percent lowering of piece-part costs when compared with SMC. Weight reduction is another advantage. Tom Walczak, cowling project engineer, reports that traditional SMC cowling represents up to twenty percent from the entire powerplant weight. At 35 lbs, Verado's cowling weighs 30 percent less than SMC. And that savings makes a huge difference within an industry that equates performance with power density. Some of that weight loss comes from the thermoplastic's specific gravity advantage versus SMC. However the style freedom from molded plastic materials contributed with this click here for info score as well. Sheth notes that plastic parts have relatively thin nominal wall thicknesses as the SMC parts will have required "bulked up" regions to mold properly. And the injection-molded parts allowed molded-in features impossible within a compression-molded part. Walczak cites the Verado cowling's patented integrated latching system--through which formerly separate hinge mounting points, cable guides, and brackets are already molded straight into the most notable cowl, as one example. This model, integration saves some weight by eliminating bolted-on latches. Furthermore, it plays a role in a decrease in assembly costs on top of the 46 percent savings in the paint line. The multi-piece nature of the cowl like-wise furthered some important style goals--ones relevant to packaging the motor and sprucing up its visual appearance. The Verado's straight-six supercharger and configuration together led to a tall engine. Zebley says the diagonal split line and overall styling of your cowling combine to "help mask that height." In balancing this industrial styleobjective against engineering needs, Mercury's engineers and designers worked together right away from the project and quite often were required to develop compromises. For instance, the engineers wanted to leave some clearance within the engine compartment for air movement. Additionally they wanted to leave some wiggle room to permit relative movement between the motor block, on its mounts, as well as a cowling that rigidly attaches to the Verado's aluminum mounting structure. Walczak states that industrial http://www.dgif.virginia.gov/fishing/ style wound up "tweaking their styling lines a bit" to offer engineering so much-needed clearance. Breaking up the cowling also solved a classic draft angle problem. Obtaining athin and tall, bucket-shaped cowl from a mold would have been almost impossible without adequate draft. Even a tiny amount of draft might have flared out the base of the cowl. And that width would have interfered with the 26-inch spacing necessary to put more than one motor on the motorboat. "Splitting the cowl made the draft angle of your individual parts a smaller amount of an issue," Walczak says. Finally, the split cowling added an important ease-of-use feature. As an alternative to struggling to lift off a huge, single-piece cowl externally the motorboat, boaters may now reach across the top cowl, unlatch it, and remove it from inside the motorboat. Very hard Material Apart from its role in dressing the Verado visually, the cowling also has to play a structural role to be able to protect the motor. MercuryMaritimetypes the cowlings to face up to deflection under static loads corresponding into a 200-lb person with size 10 shoes standing along with the engine cover. "People shouldn't get in the motorboat that way, nonetheless they do," Walczak says. And also the cowling must last to impact loads on every side of the outboard--both below and above the waterline. One of Mercury's tests involves smashing a fast-moving fake log in the leading side of the submerged gearbox, which forces the motor to pivot violently out of your water. This test can result in 300G impact loads, which ultimately transfer from the cowling components, as outlined by Walczak. So rigorous is this test that this makes a number of the company's other impact tests almost a formality. "In the event the cowling survives the log test, it survives anything else we throw at it," says Walczak. Ensuring the cowling did survive called for some design intervention since the cowling matured. For Sheth, instance and Walczak added a structural rib on the within the rear cowl to aid tie it towards the motor structure. Mercury glues from the rib using a structural urethane adhesive that gives them a joint with a lap shear strength of more than 500 psi. Shaping inside the rib would not have worked in such a case since the rib's stiffness would have interfered with all the unique ejection system utilized to buy this horseshoe shaped part from its mold--a proprietary "floating island" model from CDM Tool & Manufacturing Company. "The cowl has to flex in the tool to allow ejection from your mold," Sheth says. The Best Material An excellent knowledge of material properties also helped the various components meet the structural requirements inside the face of thermal and environmental factors that usually reduce plastics' working mechanical properties. Sheth was required to account for a number of these factors in choosing the right material for the job: The cowling parts experience temperatures as much as 230F and also exposure to UV light, salt water,rain and snow, and chemicals which range from fuel to suntan lotion. The demand for a category A surface further complicated the selection. "Glass-filled nylon 66 was the very least costly material that was both structural enough and aesthetic enough." Sheth says. But even picking the right nylon wasn't straightforward given the conditions in which the cowls operate. Before picking a material, Mercury engineers performed extensive finite-element-analysis work on the cowl using ANSYS software. And that work told Sheth that he or she needed a material with a flexural modulus of no less than 700 kpsi. Make your h2o the permanent address. A Person realize what you want from the trolling motor. Minn Kota is actually a workhorse in which dives in in order to the thick associated with it and functions right after ...That figure does fall well throughout the capabilities of reinforced nylon 66. In reality, the grade that Mercury uses has flexural modulus of roughly 1,300 kpsi. Yet Sheth's knowledge about plastic materials told him that this material wouldn't perform anywhere near that well inside the field. "We needed something with 700 kpsi after accounting for the impact ofmoisture and heat, and chemicals," he says. "And that's not something that FEA will show you." It took extensive material testing to inform him what he did need to know--the 1,300-kpsi grade under consideration will have a flex mod even closer to 800 kpsi inside the engine's actual operating conditions. "That was still adequate for your application," according to him. Sheth also put a great deal of effort into controlling and predicting glass fiber orientation from the cowl parts. It additionally influences shrinkage and warpage which could have hurt the fit from the cowl components, though orientation obviously matters for structural reasons. "The shrink at the top and bottom would have to be exactly the same," Sheth says. In the event the fibers go through the resin surface, What's more, the location of the fibers relative to the top of the part can hamper the ability to get Class A surface--. Through the style stage, DuPont performed a mold-filling analysis to see exactly how the fibers lined up from the part under different gating scenarios and molding conditions. At a later time, he dealt with experts from Mercury's molder, Bemis Manufacturing Inc., and from DuPont to fine-tune the shaping methods and conditions influencing fiber orientation. They decided, for instance, to mold the top cowl in a sequentially valve-gated tool, that helps manage fiber orientation by controlling filling patterns. Keeping Quiet Another important role to the Verado's cowling involved its contribution to reducedvibration and noise, and harshness (NVH). Each and every the engine's hushed sound boils down to the cowling. "Many things happen to be done right to create this motor silent," says Tim Reid, director of engine style for Mercury R & D. He cites a short list to the Verado that includes improved gear quality within the drive train, a nicely-tuned air intake system, the plenum that tunes the idle exhaust, along with a resonator that cancels out some of the rotor noise in the supercharger. But the cowling undeniably helped noiseless things down and offset a few of the noise added by the supercharger. "Before designing the cowling, noise measurements obtained from early motor prototypes gave us some concern," Walczak recalls. "Initial noise measurements from the uncowled Verado arrived in more than the noise measurements of a lot of our uncowled competitors." Yet the design crew didn't just accept a noisy motor. Walczak reports that they can put extra effort into optimizing the air intake system, for example the geometry in the air dam at the top cowl as well as the intake-manifold passages. Noise considerations also informed the fabric selection process. Sheth states that he sifted through dynamic mechanical analysis data and asked for sound transmission tests over a panel samples before purchasing the information to the cowlings. Their efforts have paid back. "We think we currently possess the quietest motor in the class," says Walczak. RELATED Document: And Also The WINNER IS ... Mercury's cowling model for that Verado took home a pair of model awards with the 2004 Structural Plastic materials Conference. Its top cowl won the Conference Award for the best innovative entry within the conference's design competition. And also the cowl assembly won the People's Choice Award sponsored with the Industrial Designers Society of America and Plastics News. For more information on Structural