Belatti wrote:Are you thinking what I am thinking?
Well, I think you'd
find the valves less than able to close if you discharged the pressurised propellant gas into the cylinder in any significant amount! As scarbs noted, leaks - involuntary or not - quickly lead to malfunctions. And even if someone had come up with such a system, for what might potentially only be a very momentary benefit, the technical delegates are not going to overlook something that quite clearly necessitates a larger/higher pressure/various separate gas/liquid O2(
!) bottle(
s) and obvious mechanical changes to the valvetrain and engine controls.
The only substances allowed to enter the cylinder are air and fuel; thus changing the mixture by adding pure O2 - IMHO - would be against the rules. (
"Other than engine sump breather gases and fuel for the normal purpose of combustion in the engine, the spraying of any substance into the engine intake air is forbidden." F1 TR 5.11.2/2009) It is also debatable whether such an oxygenising arrangement constitutes a purely "reciprocating poppet valve" (
F1 TR 5.1.6/2009) in function anymore. Variable valve lift, variable valve timing (
F1 TR 5.6.3/2009) also cause for concern. Of course, all the while the regulations clearly being a secondary to the feasibility and sensibility (
at least road relevance-wise) of it all. Thinking about what you, and whomever, could be thinking.
That being said, at least for next year the valvetrain remains homologated also - meaning that it will be very hard (
if not impossible) for engineers to even begin to think about offsetting associated mechanical losses with KERS. It is surely a worthwhile avenue of investigation in itself. A cyclic/replenishing recovery-powered pneumatic system could be a step in that direction, or perhaps something electromechanic or hydraulic.
This, in part, exemplifies the inefficiency in incorporating energy recovery externally to a single engine format. Furthermore, it is an argument for continuous energy cycles as opposed to push-to-pass which really isn't that road relevant in itself.
OK, I expanded more on this than I intended. But I'm sure Belatti and/or scarbs can easily either confirm or dispute the very basic notion that intentionally releasing the valve "spring" gas to the cylinder is completely contrary to the operating principle of the current F1 valvetrain itself to begin with. Apart from that (
without doing the associated math), carrying the amount of O2 required with the intention of purposefully increasing performance through valve reciprocation cycles is counterintuitive; whether it is in terms of road relevancy, ecology or general design sensibilities. What is there, really, to add to ingesting in excess of 600 liters of air (at WOT) per second? Not much.
