carbon fibre conrods

just wondering if anybody had sern any carbon fibre reinforced aluminum conrods yet?

 

WHAT ?? Seriously ??

 

no, titanium is in use though. not WIDE use, but its possible.

 

Interesting idea. Personally I don't think you'll ever see carbon fiber used for "hard" engine parts. Although a quick search found this article, Engine of the Future.

 

I've been following someones research papers on it for a while now. noticed a recent patent. would be possible to cast at home.

 

Unfortunately, carbon fiber has 2 big drawbacks.

Failure mode is explosive and sudden.

Suceptible to degradation from hydrocarbons, moisture, and heat.

Also, to make conn rods, one would have to lay up the multi piece construction and guarantee parallel through heat curing. They do induce a stressor during curing.

I would be surprised to ever see it used in conn rods, titanium is much easier to fab.

Larry

 

their initial work was to make conrods.

 

Well I used to make carbon fibre in a production plant in the late 80's & carbon conronds did exist then. We made stuff for F1 cars & the rods were designed for that use. They used steel inserts for the big & little ends held at distance by a piece of CF pipe. This was then wrapped with prepreg CF strands like a muscle. If you look at a human femur (upper leg bone) in a medical book with the skin removed they looked like that.

They never took off for a simple reason. It was impossible to make a split big end, so they had to be press fitted to the crank at assembly. Fine on a single cylinder test mule, not much good on a V12 !!!!!

So they died before they had lived. They were very light, lighter that alloy & they were incredibly strong, better that Ti rods, but being one piece units killed them, as race teams needed to be able to strip an engine in an hour.
Could you imagine trying to fit 10 or 12 pistons in to a V block at the same time ?!!!
They were horrendously expensive to, so that stopped teams having spare cranks ready made !

Great idea, but ultimately defeated by their own design limitations.