Vol. 29 • No. 2
Visit our web pages at http://uanews.org/engineering
Fall 2006
Squeezing 50 extra horses from a Mini Cooper Pushing lots of air isn’t enough. It has to be done at just the right moment.
T
he stock Mini Cooper has 115 horses under the hood. The Cooper S has 168 and if you add the John Cooper Works GP kit, that’s boosted to 214. But over at Fireball Tim Racing in California, the movie-car maker has built the MEGA MINI, a 500-horsepower, turbocharged screamer that revs to 9,000 rpm — well above the stock Mini’s 6,800 rpm red line. “Obviously, we’ve taken the car to a level where we are pushing the envelope and that required us to redesign some items,” said Hubie Fuh, president of Fireball Tim Racing. “We’re almost tripling the output of this motor. So the other components have to be optimized to work with it.” Matt Brailey Photo
New intake manifold needed One of those components is the engine’s intake manifold, which brings the air/fuel mixture to the cylinders. Enter a team of UA Mechanical Engineering (ME) students. They were looking for a senior design project at the same time that Fireball Tim Racing was looking for a racing intake manifold. The result: An intake manifold that squeezes an additional 50 horsepower from the engine, and top prize in UA’s annual Engineering Design Day. “The problem was that the factory intake manifold was optimized for the lower rpm range, while this engine does most of its racing between 6,000
Kuang Liu, a mechanical engineering senior, shows off the racing manifold that his team designed and built for their senior design project. His team won the top award at the spring 2006 edition of Engineering Design Day.
and 9,000 rpm,” said ME senior Seth Crozier. So that meant getting into the subtle aerodynamics of wave action theory, which deals with the compression and expansion of waves inside the manifold. “The difficult thing for us was that none of the theory dealing with this project was taught in our classes because it’s such a specialized field,”
Crozier said. “So we had to do a lot of research and studying to be able to analyze the problem and design a solution.” “We started slowly by checking on books about the design of internal combustion engines,” said ME senior Kuang C. Liu. “Eventually, we found a book published by SAE (the Society of Automotive Engineers) that was Continued on Page 11