WinGD Brand Guidelines: Sulzer’s Winterthur Two-Stroke Line Under a 2015 Name

A diesel licence, a Swiss works and a century of two-strokes.

WinGD traces its engines to Winterthur, the Swiss industrial town north-east of Zurich. The company says its line began in 1893, when the Sulzer brothers signed an agreement with Rudolf Diesel for his new engine, and that Sulzer started building diesel engines in Winterthur in 1903. WinGD’s own history credits Sulzer with a reversing two-stroke marine engine in 1905, a pair of valveless two-strokes in the Italian cargo ship Romagna in 1910 and, in 1912, crosshead two-stroke engines in the German cargo ship Monte Penedo, which it describes as the first ocean-going ship with engines of that type.

The company’s timeline then runs through the technical steps that shaped the Sulzer name at sea. Airless fuel injection became standard across its engine types from 1930, it says; a Sulzer 6TAD48, which WinGD calls the first turbocharged two-stroke diesel in regular operation, ran in the power house of the Winterthur works in 1946; and turbocharging became standard on its low-speed marine engines in the 1950s, opening the long series of Sulzer R-type engines. In 1972 a Sulzer 7RNMD90 entered service on natural gas in the Norwegian LNG carrier Venator, which the company describes as the first low-speed marine engine to run on gas. The RTA engines of 1983 switched from loop to uniflow scavenging, with cylinder bores of 380 to 840 millimetres, rising to 960 millimetres in 1994.

Ownership changed several times before the present name. German Wikipedia records that a restructuring after a crisis at Sulzer led to New Sulzer Diesel in 1989 and, in 1991, to the sale of the diesel division to Fincantieri, Bremer Vulkan and management, with Sulzer keeping a minority; WinGD itself dates the separate company New Sulzer Diesel Ltd to November 1990. The last engine left the Winterthur factory in 1986, the company says, so the town kept the design work rather than the production floor. In April 1997 New Sulzer Diesel merged with Wärtsilä Diesel of Finland to form Wärtsilä NSD, later Wärtsilä Corporation, and the Swiss unit, Wärtsilä Switzerland, became responsible for the group’s low-speed two-stroke engines.

A joint venture, a new owner and engines named by bore.

The present company dates from 19 January 2015. German Wikipedia, citing the Swiss business paper Handelszeitung of July 2014, says WinGD began that day as a joint venture in which China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) held 70 per cent and Wärtsilä 30 per cent, bringing their two-stroke marine engine work together at the former Sulzer diesel site in Winterthur. The name is short for Winterthur Gas & Diesel. In 2016, WinGD says, Wärtsilä transferred its remaining shares to CSSC, making WinGD wholly owned by the Chinese group, and the engine brand changed from Wärtsilä to WinGD.

The engines themselves are built by licensees. WinGD designs them and works with engine builders who make them; in April 2017 the German maritime journal HANSA reported that WinGD and Hyundai Heavy Industries had signed an extension of their licence agreement for another ten years. On 30 October 2026 Ship & Bunker reported a new licensing agreement under which HD Hyundai Marine Engine will build WinGD’s mid-bore X52 and X62 series, in diesel and dual-fuel versions, aimed particularly at bulk carrier and tanker newbuilds; the report said the dual-fuel models can run on LNG, ammonia, LPG, methanol and ethanol.

The range is named by bore. WinGD introduced its Generation X engines in 2011 and added the large-bore X92, for large container ships, in 2012, its timeline says. Its dual-fuel work began with a project in February 2011 and a full-scale demonstration on a research engine at Wärtsilä’s factory in Trieste that September. The X-DF dual-fuel series followed in 2013, using gas admitted at low pressure and ignited by a small amount of liquid pilot fuel, as the company describes it. Its current engine listing runs from the X52 to the X92, with gas versions marked DF and further suffixes for ammonia (DF-A), methanol (DF-M) and LPG (DF-P); the company lists its methanol engines under ethanol as well.

The largest of them carries a record title. In 2020 the first vessels powered by the 12X92DF came into service, and WinGD says Guinness World Records lists it as the most powerful Otto-cycle engine. The company later launched X-DF2.0, an updated version of the dual-fuel design that it says drew on the operating experience of the X-DF fleet.

Design and documentation.

Marine engine makers sell to shipyards, shipowners and ship managers rather than to the public, and their websites read like technical catalogues. The core of most is an engine range sorted by bore and output. WinGD names its two-stroke engines by cylinder bore in centimetres, from the X52 to the X92, while Everllence gives its four-stroke engines bore-and-stroke numbers such as 32/44 and 49/60. Letters added to those numbers mark the fuel, the generation or the version.

The pictures follow the product. These companies publish cutaway renderings that open an engine to show its cylinders, pistons and crankshaft, alongside photographs of finished engines on test beds and in engine rooms. Model names, cylinder counts and output figures sit beside the images, so a page often reads more like a data sheet than an advertisement.

Fuel has become one of the main ways these makers describe themselves. Their websites sort engines by fuel type as well as by vessel type, with pages for liquefied natural gas, methanol, ammonia and LPG; WinGD adds ethanol, and Everllence marks its alternative-fuel two-stroke engines with a suffix for each fuel. Dual-fuel engines, which run on gas or on liquid fuel, are presented through type designations and technical descriptions in the companies’ own terms.

Two other features recur. Service network maps and location finders show where parts and field engineers can be found; Everllence speaks of more than 140 service locations, and WinGD runs a lifecycle-support arm under its own name. Heritage timelines, meanwhile, tie current engines to Rudolf Diesel, whose engine was developed with MAN in Augsburg in the 1890s and licensed to Sulzer in Winterthur, giving the oldest names in the field more than a century of dates to show.

Service contracts, fuel pages and a short name.

Service is the other half of the business. WinGD runs a lifecycle-support arm under the name Global Service by WinGD, and its website also lists Wärtsilä Services and its engine builders as service providers. In October 2026 the trade magazine Motorship reported three long-term service agreements covering 14 LNG carriers: a ten-year contract with COSCO Shipping LNG for six carriers with 6X72DF engines, a five-year agreement with NYK LNG Shipmanagement covering ten engines across five ships, and a contract with Athens-based TMS Cardiff Gas for three newbuilds from HD Hyundai Samho, each with two 5X72DF engines.

The fuel pages are where the brand is most visible. WinGD’s website sorts its engines by fuel type, listing liquefied natural gas, ammonia, methanol, diesel, liquefied propane gas and ethanol, and by vessel type, from tankers and container ships to bulk carriers, gas carriers and car carriers. Its history page closes the timeline with the statement that WinGD continues the long tradition of the Sulzer diesel engine business, and a separate engine-history section returns to Rudolf Diesel and the Sulzer brothers.

The name is the identity’s clearest decision. In 2016 the engines stopped carrying the name of the Finnish group under which the business had sat since 1997 and took a short acronym built on the town and on the two fuels, gas and diesel, the company says. The Winterthur headquarters is at the former Sulzer diesel site, German Wikipedia notes, so the brand keeps a Swiss address and a Swiss engineering lineage while its owner is CSSC and its engines are built by licensed engine builders.

For a design guide, WinGD shows how an engine designer can carry a long Swiss lineage under a new acronym, with bore numbers and fuel suffixes doing much of the naming work. Compare Wärtsilä, the Finnish group that owned the business from 1997, and Everllence, the Augsburg engine maker formerly called MAN Energy Solutions. For this guide we use a lake blue, a steel mist and a signal teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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