Cooling system: Difference between revisions

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(Please excuse the crudity of the diagrams.)

Now, imagine you get off the freeway and pull up to a stoplight. Your heat/water tank is full, because you've been generating a lot of heat driving fast. The cooling system was able to drain off enough heat to keep things under control, but the tank filled up in the mean time. Now that you're stopped, the air flowing over the radiator is reduced to zero (which means your drain pump is down to zero pumping power). Suddenly, any excess heat at all (such as running the engine at idle) is enough to overflow the tank, because it's so full. The temperature gauge shoots up until the fan kicks in -- there's the drain pump stepping in at the last minute before the tank overflows. This situation (before the fan kicks in) is shown in the third diagram.

Now, imagine you get off the freeway and pull up to a stoplight. Your heat/water tank is full, because you've been generating a lot of heat driving fast. The cooling system was able to drain off enough heat to keep things under control as long as you were moving, but the tank filled up in the mean time. Now that you're stopped, the air flowing over the radiator is reduced to zero (which means your drain pump is down to zero pumping power). Suddenly, any excess heat at all (such as running the engine at idle) is enough to overflow the tank, because it's so full. The temperature gauge shoots up until the fan kicks in -- there's the drain pump stepping in at the last minute before the tank overflows. This situation (before the fan kicks in) is shown in the third diagram.

Revision as of 22:20, 19 March 2007 view source IanJ (talk \| contribs) Bureaucrats, Administrators 133 edits →Overview ← Older edit		Revision as of 22:23, 19 March 2007 view source IanJ (talk \| contribs) Bureaucrats, Administrators 133 edits →A useful analogy Newer edit →
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	(Please excuse the crudity of the diagrams.)		(Please excuse the crudity of the diagrams.)

	Now, imagine you get off the freeway and pull up to a stoplight. Your heat/water tank is full, because you've been generating a lot of heat driving fast. The cooling system was able to drain off enough heat to keep things under control, but the tank filled up in the mean time. Now that you're stopped, the air flowing over the radiator is reduced to zero (which means your drain pump is down to zero pumping power). Suddenly, any excess heat at all (such as running the engine at idle) is enough to overflow the tank, because it's so full. The temperature gauge shoots up until the fan kicks in -- there's the drain pump stepping in at the last minute before the tank overflows. This situation (before the fan kicks in) is shown in the third diagram.		Now, imagine you get off the freeway and pull up to a stoplight. Your heat/water tank is full, because you've been generating a lot of heat driving fast. The cooling system was able to drain off enough heat to keep things under control as long as you were moving, but the tank filled up in the mean time. Now that you're stopped, the air flowing over the radiator is reduced to zero (which means your drain pump is down to zero pumping power). Suddenly, any excess heat at all (such as running the engine at idle) is enough to overflow the tank, because it's so full. The temperature gauge shoots up until the fan kicks in -- there's the drain pump stepping in at the last minute before the tank overflows. This situation (before the fan kicks in) is shown in the third diagram.