10-06-2017, 07:00 AM
multi valve engine history pdf
History
Multi-valve engines started life in 1912 on a Peugeot GP racing car. It was then briefly used by the pre-war Bentley and Bugatti. However, mass production on road cars came as late as 1970s - Ford Escort RS1600 (1970), Triumph Donomite Sprint (1973), Chevrolet Cosworth Vega (1975), Lotus Esprit (1976), Fiat 131 Abarth (1976) and BMW M1 (1979) were the earliest adopters.
Triumph Donomite Sprint was one of the earliest road cars to feature multi-valve technology. Its 2-liter four-pot engine featured 16 valves but just one camshaft, unlike the DOHC designs popular on contemporary racing engines. The intake valves were driven directly by the camshaft, while the exhaust valves were driven by the same camshaft through rocker arms. Today, Honda's SOHC 16-valve engines still employ the same design.
By the mid-1980s, 4 valves per cylinder virtually became standard on high-performance cars, such as Ferrari 308 GTB Quattrovalvole (1982), BMW M635CSi (1983), Ferrari 288 GTO (1984), Mercedes 190E 2.3-16 (1984), Saab 9000 (1984, also the first to combine 4-valve and turbo on production car), BMW M5 (1985), Ferrari Testarossa (1985), Lamborghini Countach QV (1985) and Volkswagen Golf GTi 16V (1985), let alone those Group B rally specials.
However, it was the Japanese who came first to put multi-valve technology on mass production cars that everybody can afford. Honda Civic adopted 3-valve engines as standard in 1983 and 4-valve engines in 1987. Toyota mass-marketed its high-performance 1.6-liter 16V engine on Corolla coupe / Truneo (1983) and MR2 (1984), then equipped the bread-and-butter Corolla with 4-valve engines in 1987. They standardized multi-valve engines nearly a decade earlier than Western car makers !
Advantages and Disadvantages
Multi-valve engines have mainly 3 advantages. Firstly, it increases the coverage of valves over the combustion chamber, allowing faster breathing thus enhance power at high rev. Secondly, it allows the spark plug to be positioned in the center of combustion chamber, enabling quicker flame propagation, more even and more efficient burning. Thirdly, using more but smaller valves instead of two large valves means lower mass for each valve. This prevent the valves "float" from its designed position at very high rev, thus enabling the engine to rev higher and make more power as a result.
A comparison of the 4-valve head on BMW M3 V8 and the 2-valve head on Chevrolet small-block V8 finds the former has larger percentage of area covered by valves. The spark plug is positioned centrally in the 4-valve head, unlike the case of 2-valve head.
On the downside, multi-valve engines use more components, thus they carry more weight and higher costs. While these disadvantages can be largely overcome by mass production, another problem took some years to solve. The early multi-valve engines were not renowned for tractability. At low to medium rpm they actually produced less torque than the equivalent 2-valve engines. Why? Because the larger valve area resulted in slower air flow in the intake manifold. At low rpm, the very slow air flow led to imperfect mixing of fuel and air, resulting in knocking and reducing power. For a racing car or sports car, that might not be a big problem, but for regular passenger cars the lack of tractability is deemed to be unacceptable.
Solutions
Toyota T-VIS
In response to the aforementioned drawback, Toyota introduced T-VIS (Toyota Variable Intake System) in the mid-1980s. T-VIS accelerated low-speed air flow in the intake manifold. The theory was quite simple: the intake manifold of each cylinder was split into two separate sub-manifolds which joint together near the intake valves. A butterfly valve was added at one of the sub-manifolds. At below 4,650 rpm the butterfly valve remained closed so to raise the velocity of air flow in the intake manifold. As fuel was injected at this section of manifold, better air-fuel mixing could be obtained. At high rev, the butterfly opened to allow maximum air flow.
The T-VIS was used on performance models like AE86, MR2 and Celica. However, for its mainstream passenger cars, Toyota dropped this feature and adopted a small-diameter intake manifold/port design for cost reasons. Many other car makers went the same way, sacrificing a bit top-end power for better low-speed tractability.
Modern Approaches
In recent years, the low-speed tractability problem can be dealt with a variety of solutions, such as variable intake manifold (which boosts low-end torque), variable valve timing (which may delay the opening of intake valves at low rev to accelerate air flow) and variable valve lift (which varies degree of lift hence air flow speed). However, the ultimate solution must be direct fuel injection. Fuel is now injected precisely into the combustion chamber rather than the intake manifold. Complete vaporization is realized by the high-pressure injector as well as swirl effect.