This article is unusual in that it looks at a concept that will almost certainly never be applied to a race engine but is technically interesting enough to merit examination. In the 1950s a British truck maker made a production engine the likes of which we will never see again. Commer, a name that disappeared many years ago, came along with an engine called the TS3, but widely known as the Double Knocker. It was a three-cylinder two-stroke diesel engine with a single crankshaft, six...
Modern engine intake air intercoolers are almost exclusively made from aluminium alloy. However, although aluminium has been chosen for its ability to dissipate heat efficiently rather than any other quality, this apparently unassailable characteristic is now being challenged. Strangely enough, this challenge is coming from the solar panel industry, where not only is the efficiency of heat transfer critical but also components have to last for 25 years or more. In the automotive world the...
Crankshafts are at the heart of the vast majority of race engines; only the occasional rotary engine doesn’t have one, and even then it has something that plays a very similar role. The cranktrain, comprising the piston assembly, con rod and crankshaft, converts the reciprocating motion of the piston into a rotary motion that we can use to drive a gearbox or, as we might find in future, an electric generator. The crankshaft itself rotates in bearings in the crankcases, and at very...
The use of electrical or electronic systems in vehicles has never been greater. Like it or not, with the increasing sophistication of control brought about by more prescriptive regulatory demands or demands for even greater fuel savings, the role of electronics or electrical componentry in the racecar can only increase in years to come. And since every electrical component, sensor or actuator has at least one electrical connection to the loom, the quality and reliability of these...
Engines that use so-called wet liners/sleeves have advantages over those that use dry liners (press-in liners in machined block material) or a parent bore (cylinder bore directly in the block’s base material). For engines with wet liners, various types of installation are possible, each of them offering their own specific advantages, such as higher coolant jacket, shorter engine length and fewer gaskets (number of possible leak paths). When considering coolant jacket height, the mid-...