Singh Grooves

[an0nymous]

Searched but did not find.
Anything to this grooving stuff? The idea seems to be to channel unburned fuel towards the spark plug and break up standing vortices during combustion. Makes sense, I suppose.. but what about chamber integrity?
Somender Singh grooves in a Geo Metro!
SOMENDER-SINGH.com - Home

Thoughts?

Edit: further investigation reveals this thread at teamswift: http://www.teamswift.net/viewtopic.php?t=26432
Same guy.

[Duffman]

Hmmm never seen theis before. Interesting I guess, might work BUT, I am sure it creates hot spots in the chamber and over the long run I bet it could crack like an SOB.

I am also sure that a concept like this is not so advanced that some combustion engineer at a manufacturer could not have come up with it.

[ttoyoda]

Interesting. I would expect some cooling due to increased surface area. Taken further, the grooves could look like the "tree shaped" grooves that cutting boards had in them back in the 1960s to collect meat juice (like the skelaton of a fish with very few bones). Then maybe they would not have be as deep.

[Duffman]

Yes more surface area will cool the combustion event more and where does that heat go? into the head where the surface area is, so there will be localized hot spots. Overall the increased heat transfer means less efficiency BUT, I am open minded to the posibility that this heat transfer can be more than offset by a more efficient burn if these groves actually work.

[garys_1k]

Tough to do an A-B-A comparison of a mod like this!

[i_am_socket]

I had read an article quite a while ago (several years?) about this guy and his work in (I think) Popular Science. From what I can remember of the article:

He was working with cheap Indian cars that were crazy inefficient after spending years in motorsports. He managed to do some good stuff then just by grinding grooves in the headers. He also wanted to make more bell shaped combustion chambers. He went to several companies with the idea and the only one who gave him a shot was Briggs & Stratton and they only let him test the design on an old 2 stroke mower engine. At the end of the article he was to begin working with an actual car company.

Interesting to see what has become of this.

[i_am_socket]

HERE'S THE ARTICLE

And it's from September 2004.

[ConnClark]

Modern Combustion chambers already promote swirl in the air flow with the focal point right around the spark plug. Cutting grooves in the combustion chamber face just lowers your compression, increases heat loss from the combustion gasses, and weakens your head.

Even on an older engine, this technique has been shown to do nothing to improve peak power or efficiency. I don't have the link, but someone sacrificed an engine and tested this on an engine dyno. It will move the rpm of your peak power and torque slightly however.

[Johnny Mullet]

This is very interesting.....................

[ConnClark]

I found the experiment I was referring to RevSearch Engine Dyno; Grooves testing.

No real changes

[an0nymous]

Looks like it made slightly more torque in the usable rpms....
I notice that the test groove represent a much smaller % of the surface area than the multiple grooves per cylinder shown in the metro buildup pics. I wonder if they went as far as they should have?