In response to my earlier articles on cylinder head cooling, two comments were posted on the website by readers. Both are written more or less from the perspective of current cylinder head material and its limitations, providing enough food for thought on alternative concepts. The major driver is to achieve sufficient cooling for the several components in the cylinder head, preferably in combination with a simple and lightweight design. Looking for alternatives, on the one hand...
I can hardly believe it - it's now almost 50 years since hard rock first came to our ears. That genre of music produced by (often distorted) electric guitars, bass and drums, sometimes accompanied by piano or keyboard, made its mark on the 1960s - much like, in a different sphere of endeavour, the invention of nickel silicon carbide began to influence cylinder bore coatings. Until that time, cast-iron cylinder liner technology in race engines was pretty ubiquitous. But whereas cast iron...
As an engineer you must always be looking to improve the product, whether it be to improve its performance, increase reliability or simply make it easier and hopefully cheaper to manufacture. The general term for all this activity is development, and although now a dirty word in any engineering organisation - since it implies that the design wasn't correct in the first place - the sealing of the combustion gases at the split line between the cylinder liner and fire face has always been...
Race engine exhausts are expected to do a tough job without suffering failure, a job they generally do very well. The results of a broken pipe can be very noticeable for two main reasons - loss of performance and a marked increase in the amount of noise generated, especially on silenced systems where the breakage is upstream of the silencer. With a premium placed on both reliability and system mass, many race exhausts therefore use titanium, stainless steel and Inconel materials. Perhaps...
Nuts are often given little consideration in design, especially compared to the stud onto which they engage. The reason is quite simple: nuts rarely fail unless they are completely unsuitable for the job. What is less commonly understood though is the fact that the nut design can have a critical effect on the fatigue resistance of the stud onto which it fits and the pre-load in which it is responsible for, in cases where stud failure coincides with the first loaded threads in the nut....