If the aircraft diesel engine market lacks for anything other than buyers, it’s probably a high-horsepower engine suitable for high-performance single and twins. At AirVenture, Wisconsin-based Engineered Power System hopes to address that with its V-8 diesel that is just now beginning certification trials.
EPS is returning to AirVenture after a break and was showing the latest iteration of its powerplant. “We have reached several thousand hours of test cell testing. We have actually completed a very important test through one of the Air Force contracts we have,” said Michael Fuchs, EPS co-founder. He said the so-called Graflight engine has run in a vacuum test chamber from sea level to up to 30,000 feet for 90 minutes.
“We have been able to double-check the quality of our software and the engine combustion quality,” he said. “We are expecting to fly the engine toward the fall. We are working on integration into an SR 22 and the GA8. These are candidates that are easier to obtain because we don’t have to do structural rework,” Fuchs said.
EPS has just started certification testing and durability testing of the engine will commence after AirVenture later in 2017. Fuchs said the engine’s horsepower is scaled up to 450 HP on the high end and the weight is expected to be within about 50 pounds of comparable gasoline engines.
“We see inquiries from people who would use our engine in a commercial way. Not the average flier who flies maybe 40 hours a year. There, it probably wouldn’t make sense to convert over or buy an extra aircraft,” Fuchs added. At the higher fuel prices of a few years ago, EPS claims its engine would save the operator the cost of the engine over 2000 hours of flight.
