Today I visited the Beta assembly plant in Cheshire
England, My near 30 YO 50HP
diesel (BMW D50) will need to be replaced soon enough, and as I am visiting UK, thought I'd make a appointment and dropped in, met Andrew one of the principles and had a few questions.
firstly I have concerns about common rail/electronic injection, he said they only do it with their
Generator sets, not
propulsion engines. They consider electronic injection unsafe for
small boat propulsion sticking to traditional mechanical injection, they do however use
nmea 2000 for instrumentation.
At the factory they had engines from 10hp to (think) 135hp, he says they are all compliant with EU emmision regs , asked him about does that mean these engines have had the
fuel injection delayed to avoid Nitrus oxide emmision, dodged that one by saying they don't mess with settings determined by the manufacturer, by the way all engines are tested by the
Engine supplier (Kubota think mostly) and they are tested again by Beta before they leave the factory. Think Beta only adds the
gearbox, alternators, starters, coolers, flywheels couplings and resilient mounts.
Later was shown a hyper drive think he called it, with 2 of 48V DC motors with a big
alternator on the front says they could
motor 20% and
electric drive 80% I presume this is for a
canal boat, I asked about a
alternator suitable for LFP
battery he said one word ''Mastervolt'' showed me one
engine that had 3 alternators, extra one is for a 3 phase alternator that gets rectified to 3 Phase 50Hz in a black box.
Time was short but was impressed by the place.
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