new article on the R18 engine on speedhunters.com

Yesterday, a new article on the R18 engine appeared on speedhunters.com – THE MONOTURBO. I cannot understand, why Audi didn’t send me this pictures before. 😉 If I have had this pictures earlier, I could have built the engine much more accurate.

Although I’ve found a mass of mistakes on my engine, I won’t make any big changes. Especially the front end of the engine is completely different to my one. But I took help there from the R15 engine that has the gear drive for the ancillaries at the front end. Now, with the new pictures, the drive gear of the R18 engine is doubtless at its rear end. But with the engine mounted in the car, this error can’t hardly be seen later. But certainly that rankles me much.

Also at the turbo charger I’ve found a new item between the turbine and the compressor which should be part of the turbines lubrication system and maybe also of the VTG. The turbo also is mounted in a big angle to the cars base plane (around 20 degrees). My one is mounted nearly parallel.

The fact, that this are pictures from the 2012 engine, explains a few other differences compared to my engine. Namely the different position of the air collectors, the routing of the common rail system feeding and returning lines and the heat shields of the exhaust manifolds.

The problem which I’ve described in the post Questions about the R18 oil system I just solved with help from a few e-mailers. Thanks for that! The cooling items, which I thought they were there for oil cooling, are diesel coolers. That was another condition that I did not expected. But the need for a fuel cooling is logical in fact that the diesel heats up enormously at the common rail pressure of about 2500bar (according to Wikipedia up to 140°C).

It’s doubtless too, that the oil tank is at the engines front end and the cutout in the monocoque is necessary. I’ll have few beer on this to decide what I’ll do there. 😉

But one question is still left. The one about the cooling of the oil system. A current chain of thought is, to cool the oil by the “used” air from the cockpit. That could be a possibility, although I think, there’s too less air for oil cooling.

Here are the new pictures of the Audi engine, which throw myself into trouble.

This picture shows me an element between the turbine (silver) and the compressor (black) which is, in my point of view, part of the lubrication system.

That picture almost killed me. The difference between the former Le Mans engines of Audi is enormous. Since the R8 (1999) over the R10 (2005) to the R15(2009), al cars have the gear drive for their ancillaries (water and oil pumps) at the front. The R18 engine has it at the rear.

Very nice view of the 2012 engine. It’s a real engineering masterpiece. Although the oil tank at the front loooks giganic, it has only a capacity of approximately 22 litres.

Picture source: speedhunters.com