RC Carbon fiber engine

[Richied76]

Carbons a good insulator right? so why not use the fuel or another fluid to cool the block. Obviously nitro needs heat to burn at first anyway. The reason rocket nozzles dont melt is that they use the cryogenic liquid oxygen to cool the outer rim of itslef before the turbo pump injects it into the combustion chamber. the same goes for the sr-71 blackbird. It used its jp7 fuel to cool its chines. Concord used its fuel in the same way on its wings. If nitro is good at absorbing heat, and you can make a way of conducting the heat from the carbon in a liquid cooling process rarther than air cooled. That may go a small way to solving the heat issue. Would love to see more of this project. anyway if you did want to try the liquid cooling, i would give it ago with a liquid cooled processor heat sink for cooling PC chips. Can pick up a cheap kit off ebay for £40-50.

[riff_raff]

Just because CFRP is stronger in tension does not mean its a wet rag in compression. What do you think all of the suspension pushrods made of??
-Tim

Tim,

In certain respects you are correct. The load bearing component of CFRP, carbon fibers, are very stiff and strong both in tension and compression. The practical issue comes though, when a bunch of individual long and very small diameter carbon fibers must carry compressive loads without buckling. Because once the fibers buckle, the only thing left to carry a compressive load is the resin matrix.

Compressive strength of composite structures is helped by having lots of unidirectional plies with the fibers carefully aligned and straight. The best fiber material for such applications are pultrusions.

http://www.dpp-pultrusion.com/en/rectangular.html

riff_raff

[autogyro]

The push rods I used were about twice the thickness of the replaced steel rods, had steel tips into which the CF rods fitted at each end.
They were a third the weight and had a marked effect on engine rpm through reduced valve bounce on lighter springs.

[Pandamasque]

I'll just leave this here... http://blog.caranddriver.com/is-this-th ... ine-block/

[slime]

I'll just leave this here... http://blog.caranddriver.com/is-this-th ... ine-block/

I remember back when I first got involved in road racing (IMSA Camel GT) there was a team that ran a polymer motor. Never did great, but this was 1984!Pretty cool I thought...

[TorkRollN]

JMW,

You still around here ?

Did you ever get that r/c carbon fiber engine running good ?