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Ceramic coating on internal engine parts
I'm looking into the benefits of ceramic coating the internal parts of an engine. ie: pistons, heads, vales, etc...
Before breaking the balls of my engine builder of choice, I was hoping you guys here could chime in and enlighten me with your thoughts, wisdoms and/or experiences. Plan is a 482 with ALU Pond block... details sketchy but forged pistons & Scat rotating assembly, mild cam mostly street car but may see the occasional stress test on track... What are the benefits? Is it worth it? Or are we picking the fly sh!t out of the pepper? |
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Here, I'll make it easy for you Anthony....your pistons will already be coated. ;) I use Mahles for these stroker FE builds and they come already coated.
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Thanks mate, you're a champ :) Anything else that would benefit from coating? My tiny mind is thinking anything to aid reducing transfer of heat into an Alu block should theoretically be a good thing, (prevent expanding, etc...), but I'm way out of my comfort zone on this topic. |
Generally the use of coatings is used for friction reduction and anti-wear benefits.
The two spots where I see expansion the most on an aluminum block combination is in main bearing clearances and valve lash. I run about .0005-.00075" tighter bearing clearances on the mains. On the valve lash, solid cam engines get about .004" more tighter lash when cold and hydraulic lifter engines get a tad more lifter preload. |
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The Mahle coatings are nice parts - they use a phosphate dip on all surfaces and a graphite skirt coating. Not many ceramics are used in OE pistons. You will see hard coat anodizing on some stuff - but its actually to prevent ring microwelding and just easier to not bother masking off the top.
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Piston and Cylinder Header Coatings
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OE's are actively working on production methods to integrate traditional Ceramic Thermal Barrier Coatings on piston domes, cylinder heads and valve faces..... This is being done in an effort to recover the 30%+ thermal energy currently being lost through aluminum heads and blocks. As for hard anodized aluminum pistons I thought this was being done to maintain piston shape / integrity, much the same reason companies like Mahle have introduced steel pistons. Never thought of the ring benefits. Steel Mahle http://martincoadvertising.com/wp-co...-monotherm.jpg Anodized http://www.dragracingonline.com/itsn...izedPiston.jpg Ceramic Dome / Dry Film Skirts https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-c...0/DSCF0281.JPG |
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Race Coatings | Swain Tech Coatings | Industrial Coatings | High Performance Racing CoatingsSwain Tech Coatings | Industrial Coatings | High Performance Racing Coatings |
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Investigation of Thermal Barrier Coatings on IC Engines without going into a two year study of thermodynamics here on the forum i will just refer you to this engineering article. it is quite lengthy and talks about thicknesses and alot of science but essentially think about the properties of the components, the aluminum has it own thermal expansion properties, the head another, the coating another. the ceramic is a heat sink holding energy, the oil is splashing upon the bottom of the piston so the top and bottom surfaces have different temps, with low temperatures in the combustion chamber the coating does not absorb enough energy to function properly, hence it advantage being mainly on very high performance racing engines not street. enough cycles of expansion and contraction in a way that the coating cannot maintain its adhesion to the substrate, IE aluminum in this case, it will fail |
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Outside of exceeding 2000F+ which would obviously cause bigger problems for you and your engine, , any flaking or peeling of your coatings would be the result of some processing error. Knock on wood, we have never seen this conditions or experienced it in an internal engine coating scenario. |
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