You’ve just reached the midpoint of the season, your engine is a little ‘tired’ and so you send it back for a general rebuild to tide you through to the end of the year. As a ’spec’ engine, identical to others in the formula, the builder will no doubt strip it and check it for wear on the valve seats and tappets before rebuilding with new bearings and gaskets. But what does he do about the piston rings and cylinder bore? The engine may be slightly down on a cylinder leak-down test and so some form of remedial work may be necessary. But how much and what kind? Read more…
Archive for March, 2011
‘Glaze busting’
Thursday, March 31st, 2011Deformed head
Thursday, March 31st, 2011
It’s an obvious thing to say, perhaps, but while an engine has to contain lots of moving components in order to function properly, it also contains many parts that are not intended to move at all. For example, cylinder heads and crankcases are not intended to move, but they are still in motion. In this article, ‘motion’ means that by introducing loads to the structure of these components, continuous deformation will take place, depending on the magnitude of that loading. Read more…
Lubrication in Formula One
Thursday, March 31st, 2011
The role of the lubricant in any tribological system is to eliminate component wear and minimise the frictional drag. This is as true for any road-going touring car engine as it is for one used in Formula One - indeed, in many ways the former is a far harder task since the engine has to be protected over a much wider range of operating conditions, summer and winter and often up to 20,000 miles between oil drains. In the case of the latter, the oil simply has to last only the race. Read more…
Friction
Thursday, March 31st, 2011
When we talk about friction in regard to race engines, we are normally referring to the power or energy lost due to it, but the phenomenon of friction plays an important role in the function of many components in a race engine. Fasteners are a particular example.
For critical applications, we would ideally like to measure the tension in a fastener directly, but this is rarely possible. Our next best method of gauging the tension in a fastener immediately after tightening is to measure its Read more…
The wiring harness
Thursday, March 31st, 2011
If the ECU can somehow be considered as the brain of the engine then I guess the wiring harness is roughly equivalent to the rest of the nervous system. In humans and other animals, receptors in the skin send impulses to the brain via dendrites and the nerves. These impulses are then reconfigured and sent back to the muscles to produce some form of movement. And while great care is taken to ensure that the body’s nervous system is not overstressed or abused, likewise shouldn’t we look after our wiring harness in the same cosseting manner? And yet how often do we see the wiring harness in some Read more…
The water brake
Thursday, March 31st, 2011
The chassis dynamometer may be a convenient way of loading an engine, but to undertake any serious engine development requires a dynamometer attached directly to the output shaft of the engine. While there are various types of engine dynamometer on the market, perhaps the simplest and least costly is that of the water brake. Classed as a hydraulic machine, while some types of hydraulic dynamometer may use a pump to circulate oil, the water brake relies totally on a different fluid - water. This both resists engine torque and cools Read more…
Sealing oil drillings
Thursday, March 31st, 2011
One of the functions of a crankshaft, besides playing its fundamental part in an engine’s basic mechanism, is to transfer oil, especially to the con rod big-end bearings. In some cases, where all main bearings are directly fed from the main oil gallery in the cylinder block, and where drillings can take oil directly from the main bearing to the crankpin, there is no requirement to seal any drillings. However, in a great many cases, there is a need to reliably seal oil drillings, and there are a number of methods of doing this. Read more…
Avoiding the need to stagger
Thursday, March 31st, 2011
After inventing the internal combustion engine, it became clear that man always wanted more power, not only for racing and record-breaking, but also for his road vehicles. Today we have road-going production motorcycles that are more powerful than their Grand Prix counterparts of 15 years ago.
The merits of using multiple cylinders are well known, and to make compact engines with larger numbers of cylinders, ‘vee’ engines are a good solution. Most Read more…
DLC for pistons
Thursday, March 31st, 2011
Pistons are part of the fundamental mechanism of most internal combustion engines, and are certainly very widely employed in racing. While roadcar producers still persist in development of the rotary engine concept, it has been pretty much abandoned by racers, especially by those who produce bespoke race engines. Although rotaries might yet enjoy something of an unexpected revival as range-extenders in electrically driven vehicles, reciprocating (piston) engines will continue to dominate, both in motorsport and series production applications. Read more…
Tight times!
Thursday, March 31st, 2011
The most common aspiration of just about all power unit engineers is that of greater engine performance. Better fuel economy, improved toxic emissions or simply better torque over a wider range of operating speeds - much of it but certainly not all - is down to the selection of the cam profile and its timing.
In the search for greater efficiency, compression ratios have increased in recent times, resulting in much smaller, Read more…
