If you’ve been in the automotive industry for any length of time you will by now have the words “higher performance, less weight at a cheaper price” more or less burned into the inner soul of your psyche. Since weight is the ultimate destroyer of any performance improvement, it nevertheless rankled if ever we were to reduce the weight of the power unit by some paltry amount someone always managed to find room for yet one more electric motor in the seat! Be that as it may...
Although cast iron cylinder liners have always been a safe and reliable choice, the differential expansion rate between them and the aluminium pistons, as well as their shear weight, has always encouraged designers to look for better alternatives. When cylinder blocks were cast iron, engines were so heavy as to make any change in the cylinder liner material utterly futile but as demands for lighter engines made aluminium more attractive, the push towards some kind of aluminium cylinder...
One of the world’s leading race engine manufacturers has revealed their design philosophy regarding seals and gaskets to RET Monitor this month. Dave Salisbury, Chief Design Engineer at Engine Developments Ltd (EDL), told RET Monitor, “It’s a simple philosophy really… we just work hard to eliminate seals and gaskets wherever we can.” Whilst that sounds straight forward and much like common sense it is actually something which is very hard to achieve and...
Some of us have the regular chance to see an engine running hard on the dyno, and in many cases it is visually obvious that there is a lot of heat being radiated from the exhausts. There are many video clips and pictures on the internet showing exhaust systems glowing bright red, especially on very high-speed engines such as found in Formula One. Whilst it is clear that there is a great deal of heat being generated, what to do with this excess of energy is not clear. The management of this...
In previous articles we have looked at how to calculate fastener and joint stiffness, and seen how these values of stiffness can affect the proportion of the working load experienced by the fastener by calculating the ‘load coefficient’.See https://www.highpowermedia.com/articles/401/back-to-basics-part-2/ The forthcoming article in Race Engine Technology on the subject presents some simple examples of how variations in fastener stiffness can affect the levels of stress in...