https://www.enginelabs.com/news/f1-t...-jet-ignition/
Harkens back to Ricardo's swirl chamber for diesels.
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https://www.enginelabs.com/news/f1-t...-jet-ignition/
Harkens back to Ricardo's swirl chamber for diesels.
That's pretty interesting.
Awesome! Skyactiv ashtray pistons come to mind..
LOL! Wonder if they have to pay royalties to Honda?... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CVCC
Then again, it's been since the 70s so maybe the patent ran out?
It's funny, the wisdom Kent Fisk of the Racecar Technology program at Chaffey College (now defunked, thank you bean counters! :-() would drop, just in his off-hand comments never cease to amaze me! Back in the early 90s I recall him making the comment that the best way to "light a fire" is with an actual flame, which is what this tech is doing. I think he might have been discussing the type of combustion chamber (or pre-chamber as it were) when he made the comment.
Funny that, at the time, it was in an effort to get better mileage and emissions, but was doomed as the emissions noose tightened as the configuration has too much surface to volume, which leads to higher "quench" area and therefore higher HC emissions...
Still, you know they've pretty much perfected it if it is a preferred tech for F1...
Mike
PS John, these type of chambers were used on many "big rig" diesels for some time, though I'm not sure if they are still in use or why they fell out of favor...
IIRC, Ricardo improved the performance of carbureted diesels with his swirl pre chamber and the performance improvement of that innovation was surpassed by fuel injection.
I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea of a carb'd diesel... seems like it would try to kill itself due to pre-ignition...
On the gas engines (Honda at least), they ran the main jets super lean, and the tiny third "barrel" nice and rich, so it would light easy and inject a flame/jet of fire into the combustion chamber, which would reliably ignite the lean air/fuel mix in the cylinder.
Worked great for mileage, and was pretty good on emissions at the time, but went away as the emissions noose got ever tighter...
On a side note, MSD (Multi Spark Discharge) was started as a way to light off lean mixtures, the extra "hits" of spark energy would light the mix if the first didn't get it going... Turns out it's good for racing too! :-)
Mike
that's pretty cool...so....basically it's igniting the main combustion chamber with a torch. I wonder how often those torch tips need to be replaced. I also wonder what a cam would look like for this setup in terms of duration and overlap....hmm
Blows my mind how you do this and still time it precisely for high rpm. But I guess CVCC did similar 50 years ago, and there has got to be 100x more tools available to engine designers now. I never knew what CVCC was until now.
The ashtray pistons do 13:1 on 87 gas, with this I wonder how much higher they can go.