MAN B&W draws up K108 engine

MAN B&W has designs for a 1,080mm bore engine. The company says it has confined the designs to the bottom of a drawer while the containership market, for which the so-called K108 engine is targeted, remains depressed. “[But] if the market necessitates we will be ready,” says Gregers Thomsen, a senior manager in MAN B&W?s Copenhagen marketing department. There are already machining tools at the Copenhagen factory, for items such as piston crowns, which can handle the increased dimensions. “Sooner or later there will be more than 100,000 bhp per unit,” adds Ole Gr?ne, vice president of marketing and sales, who confirms that the 1,080mm bore MC and MC-C engine is one of three solutions the company has looked at to meet increasing power demands of larger containerships. Both of the other solutions involved adding cylinders to the K98 engine. “Psychologically, it is hard to take a bore beyond 1m,” explains Thomsen. “Owners won?t have it.” The one K98 solution involved adding more in-line cylinders. This is already available on the market, with 14-cylinder models featured in the latest MAN B&W sales literature. However there are concerns about the length of such an engine, so the other solution looked at making the K98 available as a narrow-gap twin-type vee-form engine. However, Gr?ne says this vee-form solution didn?t get off the drawing board. He explains owners didn?t like the pistons not being vertical and licensees rejected the solution because they didn?t have the capacity to build the heavier frame-box that a vee-form engine requires.