Head work, anybody heard of this????

[SuperSubaru]

In my quest to improve emissions on the engines that I build at work, I came across this mechanism for improving everything (power, emissions, and economy).

 

I am an engineer, and most items that claim to do these things all at the same time are (for lack of a better word) - crap. The only way to do this is to improve efficiency or reduce losses (mainly friction).

 

This Indian inventor carves grooves in the heads and claims to greatly improve the turbulance inside the combustion chamber, thereby letting your engine to run more efficiently on the fuel you provide. My intuition says it makes sense, but he doesn't have any reputable hard numbers for comparison. The US patent office thought it was worthy enough to grant his patent application.

 

http://www.somender-singh.com

 

Since the heads we run are only about $15, I will probably try this and do a side-by-side comparison in the coming winter months (the slow period). The engine I will test is a 6HP air-cooled gasoline - if it works, I will let you all know for the next time your have to do your head gaskets, you can get out your Dremel tool as well.

 

There is no shortage of people that admit to it working, race engines and stock alike. He even had an article in a Popular Mechanics magazine.

[Wayne Boncyk]

Hey, I'm all for this kind of experimentation to see if these ideas really work. If you can demonstrate more than a few % difference in the scored heads vs. non-scored heads, then I'll be interested in trying it myself. More power to ya!

[idosubaru]

i don't know jack. but the roughness of the intake and the tight turns it takes to get from throttle body to combustion chamber cause turbulance that aids in this. whether that can be improved upon i have no idea. that's why you don't polish the intake ports like you would the exhaust ports when you "port and polish" the heads.

 

experiment away.

[Hodaka Rider]

This is for increasing turbulance in the chamber during the compression, combustion, and exhaust processes.

[Storm]

This is pretty interesting. I'm curious if the sharp edges left from the grooving would lead to detonation problems. I didn't read the article, just looked at the pictures :brow:like the nudie books:brow:.....Does angle, width or open area make a difference in combustion? I wonder if there is a point where compression ratio drops enough to negate the gain in combustion efficiency?

 

I had a set of heads that were built by a pretty successful Canadian performance shop and they had 4-5 small grooves running across the floor of the intake ports as the made the dip into the valve faces. Supposedly it's an old motorcycle tuning trick, but I have never seen the grooving done in the chamber itself.

 

Jay Storm

[SuperSubaru]

The cutting lines in the intakes (perpendicular to flow) works, that has been done for years. They help with the vaporization and turbulance of the intake charge.

 

They claim the cuts in the chamber reduce tendency to detonate and engines run cooler, so theoretically you could increase compression ratio - which would make your engine more efficient. You should also be able to lean out the mixture more, since you are getting better mixing of the charge.

 

If I can get approval from my manager, or wait until he takes a week off (probably between Christmas and New Year's), I will run a side-by-side HP, Torque, Fuel Flow, and Emissions run. The fuel flow I don't think would change as engine vacuum isn't going to change much, so without rejetting the carb - there shouldn't be much difference.

[johnceggleston]

from the pictures , it does'nt take much of a groove to make this improvement. would more be better? probably not on the piston head since you want it working as the mixture enters not during the compression stroke?

 

just wondering?

 

The cutting lines in the intakes (perpendicular to flow) works, that has been done for years. They help with the vaporization and turbulance of the intake charge.

 

They claim the cuts in the chamber reduce tendency to detonate and engines run cooler, so theoretically you could increase compression ratio - which would make your engine more efficient. You should also be able to lean out the mixture more, since you are getting better mixing of the charge.

 

If I can get approval from my manager, or wait until he takes a week off (probably between Christmas and New Year's), I will run a side-by-side HP, Torque, Fuel Flow, and Emissions run. The fuel flow I don't think would change as engine vacuum isn't going to change much, so without rejetting the carb - there shouldn't be much difference.

[robm]

It looks like a cheap and simple modification. Note that the groove seems to point at the spark plug. I wouldn't be surprised to find that it points right at the tip of the plug. I bet Sir Harry Ricardo would love it. He experimented with so many ways to create turbulence in the combustion chamber I am surprised he didn't come up with this one.

 

I suspect the results would be really spectacular on a side valve engine, as his website relates, but less effective on an OHV, with less squish area.

 

Aren't you a little concerned about stealing a patent? North American companies complain about technology theft by Asian manufacturers, but that doesn't confer any moral right to steal their ideas.

[SuperSubaru]

I am not stealing anything, I just want to test it to see if it works. If it does live up to the lofty claims, then I would probably forward the data to Mr. Singh and see if I could use it in production.

 

I brought it up here, in this forum, because with all the 2.5L headgasket issues, there is a lot of people that remove there heads. This would be a great opportunity to see if someone else wanted to try it, one their own vehicle. I would be trying it on a small air-cooled engine.

 

The grooves do point at the spark plug, allegedly so the turbulance created can accelerate the flame front (which starts there).

[bgd73]

Seems common sense. From the pics at his website,I didn't know there were that many sloppy combustion chambers designs ! It looked like most of them left a sloppy dead space on half the piston at tdc.

I liked the groove in all of them except for the perfectly hemispherical chamber- no need there for the groove (my guess).

[robm]

It looks to me like several of those were old side valves, the worst possible combustion chamber. A couple of classic "bathtub" chambers. The hemi heads sometimes have poor combustion characteristics, as the chamber often has lots of surface area and low turbulence. Squish is good, hemis sometimes don't have much.

 

I had a look at the photos again. The hemis look like pretty good ones, lots of squish. It would be interesting to try 3 grooves, angled slightly to set up a vortex, on these heads. If one is good, is more better?

 

This would be a really easy thing to try on aluminum heads. Grind in a groove, try it out, and weld it up if it doesn't work. If you had TIG and a mill, it wouldn't cost anything at all.

[nipper]

In my quest to improve emissions on the engines that I build at work, I came across this mechanism for improving everything (power, emissions, and economy).

 

I am an engineer, and most items that claim to do these things all at the same time are (for lack of a better word) - crap. The only way to do this is to improve efficiency or reduce losses (mainly friction).

 

This Indian inventor carves grooves in the heads and claims to greatly improve the turbulance inside the combustion chamber, thereby letting your engine to run more efficiently on the fuel you provide. My intuition says it makes sense, but he doesn't have any reputable hard numbers for comparison. The US patent office thought it was worthy enough to grant his patent application.

 

http://www.somender-singh.com

 

Since the heads we run are only about $15, I will probably try this and do a side-by-side comparison in the coming winter months (the slow period). The engine I will test is a 6HP air-cooled gasoline - if it works, I will let you all know for the next time your have to do your head gaskets, you can get out your Dremel tool as well.

 

There is no shortage of people that admit to it working, race engines and stock alike. He even had an article in a Popular Mechanics magazine.

no.

 

Turbulance in the wrong place can cause a stumble or worse and some rpms.

ENgineer to engineer.... the auto market is so competative and bloodthirsty for every inch of torque and ounce of HP if this worked then it would have been done.

 

One of the most engineered parts of an engine is the intake and exhaust system, and how they interact with the valve train. In the old days when air and fuel were in the exhast mainifold, you wanted some turbulance to help stir things up. Thats when they used to port and polish the heads, but not too polished, as some of that roughness helped with the turbulance to mix things.

Now with air only in the manifold, you want to get that air to the tip of the fuel injector asap. After the air gets sprayed with fuel, thats when you want turbulance. Turbulance is generated at the area right before the valve by the angle of the valve (not the faces) and piston design, and sometimes by the manifold itself. Each mfg has his own little trick. HAving turbulance before the desighned induced point of turbulance, you can really screw things up. We are talking about very high speeds of air flow, and being a compressable medium, is not always predictable.

The next problem is to make this optimal at all engine parameters, so naturally there is a little tradeoff. Now for specific duty engines, you can toy with things (race cars for example) to optimize thier effeciencies at particular rpms. With a road engine that is tough.

Now if you go dickering with this, you can easily make a car undriveable. You can also make the emissions worse.

 

nipper

 

PS it seems like he is talking about deisels (squish and quench usual deisel terms), more then spark ignition engines. Also i tried to trace the patent and no such patent exists. Also there is more propaganda on that site, i would need to see proper dyno testing by anindependent lab before i beleive it.

If you can find a real link, can you show me please? ALso it is being apllied to older engines, since they state (in very unprofessional ways)

Seems like this only for older engines, and there is nothing new here.

 

"The best part of this simple groovy mod is, you can hack your own head to bring about these 'sudden' changes in your very own old engines with just basic hand tools & a little application of common sense ! "

http://somender-singh.com/content/view/102/52/

 

 

 

[nipper]

PPS the more i read the article more i started laughing. Talk of rearranging molcules in a ballet is funny.

 

N2 is an inert gas and its "even" distribution with the remaining 21% of Oxygen (O2) along with the unstable hydrocarbon molecules gives rise to a truly ideal homogeneous mixture within the compressing charge prior to ignition. Grooving brings about a ballet between the non-combustible molecules and a small percent of unstable Hydrocarbon molecules as the cylinder diminishes bringing them ever closer, causing friction between the two, leading to heat build-ups as the piston forms the combustion chamber at TDC.

 

 

If it was that simple to seperate elements we would have H2 filters on our water taps. Not to mention the "unstable hydrocarbon" molecules are extreemly stable. Maybe they meant volitile.

 

This paragraph gives me a headache, so many things wrong with it i dont even know where to start. Hydrocarbons are long chain molecules made up of atoms, they dont *poof* become atoms.

 

What follows after ignition is a chemical reaction, due to the applied heat spreading into the Hydrocarbons and popping them into atoms in the presence of Oxygen, to start a thermal reaction called 'combustion' resulting in instant by-products of molecules made up of H2O in the form of super heated steam along with CO2 bringing about some fantastic expansions in the buffer gases largely made up of Nitrogen, due to the even heat build-ups in the confined chamber achieved out of grooving. It is this 'rapid expansion' within the spread-out Nitrogen molecules, making up the largest and heaviest expanding commodity trapped within the cylinder along with the fast-expanding super-heated steam that are collectively responsible for acting forcefully on the piston in an expanding cylinder to propel all types of IC Engines by spinning the crankshaft with the help of pistons & conrods !

 

ok ill stop:clap: my head hurts, but i wan some of what they are smoking

[bgd73]

Has this thread been posted?

I did something unintentionally with a 350 c.i. and 305 heads. A friend noticed the 8:1 dished pistons had a nearly perfact mate with the smaller chamber of the 305 (better than the 350 with its own heads). Of course we were out for power- but I did learn for the same fuel mileage I could do 150 mph (no joke). I know they are flawed to keep us from having too much. The EA82 is by far the most restricted (ridiculously) engine i have ever encountered.What this guy is doing with grooves must be a help to some- why would he waste his time? what is he marketing? He found some good points with some chemistry babble

the combustion chamber is not maximizing combustion.

I have learned it personally ,unintentionally, nothing to sell.

[nipper]

Has this thread been posted?

I did something unintentionally with a 350 c.i. and 305 heads. A friend noticed the 8:1 dished pistons had a nearly perfact mate with the smaller chamber of the 305 (better than the 350 with its own heads). Of course we were out for power- but I did learn for the same fuel mileage I could do 150 mph (no joke). I know they are flawed to keep us from having too much. The EA82 is by far the most restricted (ridiculously) engine i have ever encountered.What this guy is doing with grooves must be a help to some- why would he waste his time? what is he marketing? He found some good points with some chemistry babble

the combustion chamber is not maximizing combustion.

I have learned it personally ,unintentionally, nothing to sell.

fame and fortune. There are a lot of crackpot ideas out there, just because someone is pushing it doesnt mean its any good.

 

New cars do maximize combustion, older cars dont, which really is the point he is addressing. They have to maximize it otherwise the cats get very very angry.

 

Subaru engines by design are fairly free flowing mechanically. The restrictions for the ea82 is the exhaust desighn. The ea82 would be a possible (doubtfully) candidate for this.

Newer engines could things worse. Maybe post this on the older subaru board.

 

nipper

[Ranger83]

Looking at the dyno results, it appears the variations are well within those typical between runs.

[robm]

There are dyno runs shown on his site that look like an improvement, but closer examination shows that in additon to grooves, they also boosted the CR by at least 1. Any improvement in power and fuel consumption can be credited to that factor. Although they do say that high octane gas wasn't required....

 

There is one dyno test that compared a high compression engine with and without grooves. No change.

 

I suspect that if it has any effect at all, it will only be noticeable on side valve engines. There hasn't been a lot of development of side valves in the last 50-60 years, this may well work for them. Like Nipper says, the competition for power/torque/BSFC is so fierce, anything so simple wouldn't have been overlooked - except on an engine where development has stopped.

[nipper]

There are dyno runs shown on his site that look like an improvement, but closer examination shows that in additon to grooves, they also boosted the CR by at least 1. Any improvement in power and fuel consumption can be credited to that factor. Although they do say that high octane gas wasn't required....

 

There is one dyno test that compared a high compression engine with and without grooves. No change.

 

I suspect that if it has any effect at all, it will only be noticeable on side valve engines. There hasn't been a lot of development of side valves in the last 50-60 years, this may well work for them. Like Nipper says, the competition for power/torque/BSFC is so fierce, anything so simple wouldn't have been overlooked - except on an engine where development has stopped.

 

in addition side valve engines tend to be industrial engines that are available in the third world, or small displacement (lawn mowers). Even those engines are heading for emission controls.

 

nipper

[cookie]

I would think the grove could actually reduce compression. I saw some of his stuff several years ago that had many groves that had to cut compression.

Have at it if you wish but mine will stay stock.

[SuperSubaru]

Well I got the rubber stamp from my boss to go ahead and give it a try - it really won't cost us anything but time. But I will be gathering actual data:

 

-HP

-Fuel Flow (which I can't believe would change much as the jetting isn't going to change and manifold vacuum is going to be the same)

-Emissions (CO,HC,NOx,CO2,O2)

 

If fuel and HP don't change (which will probably be the case), the emissions will give a much better reading as to what is actually happening during combustion. If combustion efficiency goes up, HC,CO, and O2 will go down, and CO2 and NOx will go up.

 

I have to agree with Nipper that a 4-valve engine probably has little room for improvement in head design. But most 2-valves have substantial squish area. My test engine is an overhead 2-valve, gasoline, air-cooled, carburated single cylinder, rated at 6HP.

 

Here will be my test method:

Run the engine - record data

remove head - carve groove - install head

run the engine - record data

 

same head, same valve lash, same everything, only change will be the groove.

 

If there is any measurable improvement beyond normal run-to-run variances, then the experiment will continue. I will post the results.

 

I did look up the patent number on the USPTO website, it does exist.

[nipper]

if i rember correctly on a flathead, anything you do to it will increase performance. i dont think your going to have much luck, but will be interesting to see the dyno readings.

(and im a stickler for dyno reports, so you need to record ambiant temp and RH to make me happy )

 

 

nipper

[SuperSubaru]

if i rember correctly on a flathead, anything you do to it will increase performance. i dont think your going to have much luck, but will be interesting to see the dyno readings.

(and im a stickler for dyno reports, so you need to record ambiant temp and RH to make me happy )

 

 

nipper

 

Of course, humidity and temp are used in the calculations for a correction factor. So we are always comparing apples to apples - hope to have the testing done by the end of the week.

[SuperSubaru]

I did a CARB/EPA 6-mode test run 100,75,50,25,10,0% loading on the dyno.

 

I carved one groove opposite the spark plug on a 6HP engine, here are my before and after final results - kind of what I expected:

 

Baseline

6.41 HP

12.76 g/kW-hr HC+NOx

286 g/kW-hr CO

 

w/ Groove

6.36 HP

12.72 g/kW-hr HC+NOx

287 g/kW-hr CO

 

Overall, what was gained in NOx was lost in HC hence the nearly identical numbers for the additive standard. I would say both are within the experimental testing error - so no change.

 

And for Nipper's sake:

baseline:

Drybulb 68.0 degF

Wetbulb 63.3 degF

RH 79.2%

 

Groove:

DB 70.2

WB 65.7

RH 76.0%

 

Barometric Pressure 738.05 mm Hg (I only measured once as it doesn't change that fast on a constant overcast day).

[cookie]

that's about what I would expect, although it is so close I'm not sure that it is measureable. A small drop in power due to lower compression.

[Mark-O-Back]

Yeah But...

The groove apears to be just part of the equation. You have to increase the CR and retard the timing to take advantage of the supposed improvement. That's what I gathered from my brief reading of the stuff.

Right? It's not just the groove it is what modifications you can do along with it?

Sounds too good to be true, maybe, but I'll reserve judgment. I am dubious. Nipper cracked me up! I really appreciate his posts on this I'm sayin Yeah what he said.