My previous article on titanium alloys looked at the possible benefits that Ti10-2-3 - an alloy containing 10% vanadium, 2% iron and 3% aluminium - might offer compared to the widely used Ti6-4 material. Ti10-2-3 has found wide use on military and civilian aircraft, commonly in structures where steel has traditionally been the material of choice. As in motor racing, there is a great advantage to be had in the aerospace industry in terms of mass reduction. Read more…

It is a fact that development of titanium alloys is driven by the substantial needs of the aerospace industry, for improved properties or lower costs. The use of titanium is widespread in aircraft, both military and commercial, and with great emphasis being placed on reducing mass, the development of better alloys allows parts currently made in titanium to be even lighter or for steel parts to be replaced with titanium. The development and use of surface engineering processes goes hand in hand with new alloy development in allowing the replacement of steel. Read more…

In a previous article on aluminium-beryllium, we looked at how its combination of low density, stiffness and thermal conductivity makes it ideal for pistons. As I explained though, the material - for Formula One at least - is now prohibited, and outside Formula One, there is perhaps little appetite for using it.

Besides pistons, I mentioned a number of other applications where aluminium-beryllium might be considered, including static applications. In this article we will look briefly at some of the other materials used in reciprocating applications where aluminium-beryllium is now banned.

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This is the first occasion where we have covered the use of copper alloys, and we shall look briefly at their main applications. Throughout the article the word ‘bronze’ is used: technically this is a copper alloyed with tin, among other things but bronze has also come to describe many copper alloys such as brasses (copper-zinc alloys) and others.

In terms of four-stroke con rods, most of us will be familiar with the concept of using a bushed small Read more…

Previous articles have mentioned a few materials that are used for pistons, and the subject was also covered in a recent Race Engine Technology article on pistons. But there is one material that has been hailed by one piston design expert I spoke to as being ideal here - aluminium-beryllium. Blessed with a combination of desirable properties that may be present individually in other materials, it would almost certainly have been the material of choice now, had it not been banned by the FIA. Such was its importance that it was banned in an era when Read more…

Last month we discussed the aluminium alloy AlSi10Mg and the fact that it can now be processed by means of a new manufacturing process. It is only because of the fact parts can be made of this material by this process that I chose to categorise it as being ‘advanced’. The picture which accompanied the article showed a small aerospace part which would be impossible to make by other means.

There is now, however, a wide range of materials Read more…

Owing to the fact that the subject material of this article is, in itself, fairly unremarkable, we should, perhaps, consider what it is that makes a material advanced. Is it significant that it is of an unusual composition? Perhaps we consider a material to be advanced if it has unusual or desirable properties. Possibly a combination of criteria make a material seem advanced to us. An interpretation which I would like to use, for the purposes of this article at least, and perhaps for other articles to follow is that a material is an advanced one if it offers us new opportunities in design.

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In previous articles on advanced metals, we have looked at a number of materials currently used in motorsport and some which are just starting to be used. In this article, we will look at a material which has, at times, been held up as a ‘wonder-material’ and at other times almost completely neglected when we consider engine design. Despite this it has been widely used in racing engines for structural and reciprocating parts, and is commonly found on many road vehicles. It is Magnesium to which I refer, and in this article we will look at the various applications for which it has been Read more…

In a previous article on the subject of advanced metals, we reported on the properties and uses of aluminium metal matrix composite materials as used in the modern racing engine. As can be seen from the table in that article, metal matrix composites have a lot to offer the designer of racing engines. The obvious areas where we might seek to use stiff lightweight alloys are the parts which we need to accelerate and change direction at high frequency, and the largest and most important of these, is the piston.

Metal matrix composite pistons are not a new concept Read more…

In a recent article in the crankshaft section of the website, I discussed very briefly the methods by which heavy metal counterweighting can be added to crankshafts. Heavy metal is the common term, but a more technically correct description would be dense metal, and these are generally tungsten alloys.

The picture which accompanied the aforementioned article showed additional counterweighting mass in the form of cylinders or slugs of tungsten pressed into place in each counterweight. There are some advantages to this Read more…