Hello everyone
And welcome to this week's video
Today I will be explaining F1 Engines
now, F1 engines are just like your normal car engines
In the way they operate they are piston-cylinder engines
so if you don't quite understand engines yet
I have a video on piston-cylinder engines with the typical cycle
and that will be a great place to start before watching this
some things in this video might be confusing if you haven't yet watched that
so
Formula 1 engine
what do we have got going on
Well, it's restricted to 2.4 litres
and a 90-degree v8 configuration so what that means is you've got two cylinder
banks of four cylinders perpendicular to each other so you've got four cylinders
here four cylinders here and there are 90 degree angle
that's the layout of the engine so for balance
per cylinder much like many modern-day cars
um unlike many modern-day cars it revs up to eighteen thousand rpm and that is
restricted
they have in the past revved higher than that around 20,000 um so what
enables a Formula one engine to rev up to eighteen thousand rpm
well it has to do with its board stroke ratio which is very high which means the
cylinders are very wide and very shallow so the piston doesn't have to move all
that much between cycles as per revolution
so in in the typical car you may have a square board stroke ratio or even a less
than one board stroke ratio so you can have something like this going on this
is not accurate at all in there
the cylinders look much more like this and so with that your piston isn't moving
as quickly as it would be if your stroke or be a lot greater and you're at
eighteen thousand rpm and pretty much be impossible
um flame propagation as well as the inertia of the Pistons would would be
ridiculous
so oh and one more thing it is a dry use a dry sump oil system now I haven't gone
over this yet and i probably will in a future video
but just know that what that means is it takes that oil sump which typically is
underneath you got your oil pan in your car
well you take that out and you're allowing yourself to lower your engine
and then you put your oil tank any where in the vehichle you want and just
have lines leading to the engine
so by doing that you know you you've lowered your engine and also you don't
have that oil sloshing in there or possibly getting to the side and that
that hose is trying to suck in oil might be when you're going around a corner and
three or four G's you know it it might just be sucking in air and air is not
great to get into your oil oil system so obviously you need a different set up a
dry sump allows you to do that
so you just have a separate tank and pump in the oil directly from that
ok so two big differences that i'm going to go over with Formula 1 engines
they are different from your your everyday like what I've got my acura of
four cylinder engine
so one thing is the air intake so if you notice when the drivers are driving
they've got that hole right above their head
that's the air intake for the engine so what it does is it acts as a diffuser so
that
hi fast-moving air goes in a lot of people think that it's kinda to ram the
air in and
sound like a on an air RAM which it's not really
that's not really what it's for what it was it's the reason they do this is to
so they spread it out so that slows down the air
so you kind of lose that effect um the reason you want to slow down the air is
to increase the pressure of the air as it's going into the cylinders so by
doing that you get a better volumetric efficiency and the air distribution
between the cylinders is very even if you have this more narrow you know might
just feed into one more than others
so what do I mean by a better volumetric efficiency
well volumetric efficiency is a ratio of how much air you have in that cylinder
compared to if you had the same size cylinder of air at atmospheric pressure
now because you've got your piston and it's sucking in the air as it moves down
it is trying to pull in the maximum amount of air as possible
the maximum it could possibly pull in would be one atmosphere right
that seems pretty obvious well it can't quite get there it may be it you know
eighty five percent so that means 80
it's at eighty-five percent of atmospheric pressure that's how much air
is within that cylinder so we had something like a turbocharger or
supercharger you can increase your volumetric efficiency above one because
the pressure inside of the cylinders is going to be greater than atmospheric
pressure
you may have two times the amount of air that you could possibly have in a
cylinder and atmospheric pressure
so your volumetric efficiency would be two hundred percent and that's great
all right another difference you have with f-1 engines is the valvetrain so if
you don't understand valve trains i've got a video on dual overhead cam vs
overhead cam vs overhead valve those are all three options
you ever want to look at so for this I'm just going to explain the valves
themselves because this is this is a key difference between a typical engine and
Formula one engine
so like in my car what I've got going on is I gotta valve and it's got springs so
the camshaft pushes down on this valve and then as the camshaft moves off the
valve the spring pushes the valve closed back again
so here's a little cylinder and it would close it back off
well in Formula 1 you've got pneumatic valves
so are you okay pneumatic air pressure so what's going on with that
so instead of a spring you have sort of a piston-cylinder device and so this
piston cylinder this piston is attached to the valve and then you've got the
cylinder here which is full of pressurized nitrogen nitrogen because it
keeps its a pressure fairly constant with differences in temperature
you don't want water and stuff like that in there for corrosion so you use
something like nitrogen now as as you uh your camshaft comes and it pushes
down on to this on to your valve
it will press in this piston and so that pressure once that cam comes off of the
valve that pressure is going to be what pushes the valve back to the closed
position
so by switching to pressurized air system or pressurized nitrogen rather system
what you do is you eliminate the weight of that spring first of all and you can
rev up to higher rpms because air is going to be a little more consistent and
you don't have to worry about the valve kind of floating the spring not pushing
it back fast enough so it's better system for these kind of ridiculous RPM
numbers that you get with formula 1
engines so that's my overview here
one thing I guess I did not mention was the air intake there is a reason they
put that up as high as possible basically and that's so that you get
cool clean air if you put in near the road you know you're going to have
warmer air and also it's going to be tubulent you don't want turbulent air
you're not going to get as much you decrease that volumetric efficiency i was
talking about
so the place is as high as possible get nice laminar air to go in there nice and
cool
maximum amount of oxygen so that's Formula ones and i'll just show a quick
picture of one of these intakes just if you haven't seen that
and so here you can see three different cars and just so just kind of how the
air intake system evovlved over a couple of years and you can just look at the
different ones there but once again right above the driver's head for that
cool clean hair
so here's another useful image this is actually back when they used 10 cylinders
but regardless you can get the ideas from it if you see that yellow sort of
Ring going around the top of the engine
that's actually where that air intake is going to kind of attach
you see those little Bowl points right there so that you'll have the even
airflow to each of those cylinders you can see all the openings for the intake for
each of the cylinders and those little cylinders right above them are the fuel
injectors and so then obviously you can see the exhaust manifold shiny chrome on
the outside and in the bottom left the multi-plate clutch