When (or if) we watch a Formula One race on television this year, the commentators will probably talk about the KERS system, and how (or if) it is being used. The KERS units have yet to attain the same impressive level of reliability of the highly stressed internal combustion engines used alongside them. This is hardly surprising; we understand combustion engines pretty well after having developed them for more than 130 years, and modern race engines, in series where regulations are...
While the concept of the turbocharger has been around since 1926, the basic compressor/bearing housing/turbine hasn't changed that much in the past 50 years. Certainly compressor wheel aerodynamics have improved considerably and turbine technology has also changed quite a lot. But apart for the introduction of some variably geometry designs, outwardly most turbo units are still very similar to the ones I played with when I first started, many years ago. But if you look closer,...
The design of valve lift profiles can no longer be described as the sole province of the specialist engineer. Today we have many excellent software packages that will do just that without having to go anywhere near a polynominal equation or even think about things like 'instantaneous radii of action'. Introduced to the precise geometry of the valvetrain, these will, with relative ease, output a profile within the constraints of jerk, acceleration and velocity. Once more, with the...
In a previous article on oil-shedding coatings in summer 2010, I mentioned some of the reasons why they might yield performance gains in an engine where frictional losses due to the action of oil shearing are significant. These coatings are likely to offer most gain in engines where there is a combination of an excess of oil and a number of areas of small dynamic clearance where shearing takes place. The reality is that, where opportunity exists to engineer a more carefully considered...
There have been brief mentions in the pages of Race Engine Technology of the possibility of coating the big-end bore of con rods directly with the soft metal bearing coatings that we find on the surface of bearing shells. Further mentions have appeared in previous RET-Monitor articles on the subjects of coatings and con rods. Many years ago, this was indeed the way it was done, with the bearings manually 'scraped' by hand to achieve the correct size. Progress in the production of...