What If Build Ideas...for Land Speed Racing

Been a while since I posted anything. Been working on finish welding, seat belt anchor plates, tubs etc. I my daily thoughts of HP needs, I started to question compression ratio and boost, how they correlate and what to do. While discussing with a friend, he shed some light on it for me:

The simplified version is to use the ideal gas law PV=nRT to calculate your starting molar mass "n" by translating to (PV)/(RT) = n. P = Pressure, V = volume, R = gas constant, T = Temperature. Starting volume is cylinder displacement, starting pressure would be 90 kpa for naturally aspirated and 90 kPa + (boost pressure*0.90) for pressure charged. Estimating based on expected volumetric efficiency (90%). Temperature will be expected intake charge temperatures. 35C for N/A and 60C for pressure charged. You can then calculate the molar mass at bottom dead center / cylinder filling.



You know the compression ratio, so you know V1 (volume 1) and V2 (compressed volume 2). So you can use the equation (P1xV1)/V2 = P2. To find your compressed cylinder pressure. Once you have P2, you can again use PV=nRT to calculate your compressed T2 temperature. (P2 xV2)/(nxR) = T. Now that is purely compression based temperature changes, but for spark ignited engines, the ignition is before TDC and peak cylinder pressure will rise well above the static compression ratio pressure rise.



Which is where "late" ignition comes into play. Where you delay the ignition of a pressure charged engine to limit the maximum cylinder pressure (Pmax), which limits your maximum cylinder temperature, which directly impacts the propensity of knock. This is also done on naturally aspirated engines, but not to the same extent. For example, an engine with 10:1 CR runs a maximum cylinder pressure of around 60 Bar. The another with 8.5:1 CR runs nearly the identical maximum cylinder pressure of 60 Bar, but the angle of Pmax is much later in the cycle, the area under the curve is much larger, so it generates more power.



The lower 8.5CR reduces the initial cylinder pressure / temperature of compression, which limits the propensity of knock and allows late ignition. The trade off is a loss in thermal efficiency due to the loss in expansion ratio. Which requires additional air mass flow (more boost pressure) to make up the difference again. That trade-off shows up in brake specific fuel consumption which will be much higher.