Piston Cooling
Turbo Mini Forums

I was looking at having the ford zetech oil jets added to my wish list in order to help keep the piston temperature in my turbo engine at a reasonable level. However, After looking around the net i have found that quite a few companies offer ceramic coating for pistons which apparently maximises the amount of heat rejection from the metal.

So basicaly has the same effect as the oil jets pointing at the bottom of the pistons.

Any thoughts to weather this is worth while ?

Well it seems to work, and be reliable when done properly...
The thought of 'bits' breaking off has always given me concern, but i'm probably just biased!!!!

We need someone to actually do it and see how effective it really is!

Do consider though, if the heat isn't going into the piston, it's going somewhere else! Is that a bad thing with a turbo, maybe not disasterous, but worth considering... Alex might shed some light on this from his experience at Ford...

A friend of mine uses the ceramic coating on his "high dose N2O" engine with great success. It never came off the piston crown, even when he had a "small" problem when injecting not enough fuel to the amount of nitrous he should have done. When I open my engine next time I will also coat my pistons and chambers with his stuff!

Bimmer Twinky headed and turboed A-Series:
http://www.minifreunde.at/harry/projects.htm

isnt this coating only like a few microns thick, cant imagien it being physically thick enough for "bits" to break off.. but if there was detonation and a smal bit of piston was blown off, it would leave un-treated piston beneath :S

turbo 16v k-series 11.9@118.9 :)

Denis O'Brien.

We use this all the time at work as we see temperatures in excess of 1000 degrees on the gas turbines. We use it as a life extender basically. Trust me it can come off, usually due to heat though and it just burns and coats something else further down the line!

would of thought it was reliable though in an engine as things dont get that hot (compared to what we see).

Good thinking, i might have to get mine done! Good job i know one of the people down at the coating place!

It can come off but thats not normally a problem.

The problem is that you are refelecting the heat around the combustion chamber so your going to massivly change the heat distribution.

We have no idea how well our valves are copeing with the heat, they work most of the time and we all are happy, but we could be right at the end of their heat range and a piston coating might push them over the limit.

I predict it will over heat the exh valve and cause it to fail if you use this technique on our engines. We don't have a piston temp problem anyway so oil cooling jets are fine... they also work really well, just having them there and working is worth a 100 degree C drop in crown temps!

Alex

AlexF

It coming off is a problem! It can do a lot of damage! We see it all the time.

Valve heads could also be coated.....

Not seen it coming off on pistons before...

If you coat the heads, then it would hit the seats... then the head itself (how good are the cooling passaages on an a-series head?)?


Alex

AlexF