JIM5.0

Years ago, as a child, I bought a book on how to build push-rod carbed big block engines for performance. Most of it was over my head since I was very young. But one of the things I remember is they wrote about is piston top, valve face, and head combustion chamber thermal barrier coating.

My question is just how far along has thermal barrier coating come along?
My biggest concern is the molecular bonding to the metals would not be sufficient enough to prevent flaking especially under the high temps and pressures from boosting and/or nitrous.


I know that one of the things thermal barrier coating does is prevent heat from escaping the combustion chamber during ignition of the fuel/air charge. By the laws of thermodynamics, that means that retained heat must be expended into energy of other forms, namely that heat being preserved in the cylinder promotes the conversion of the combustion into mechanical energy instead of a lot of that energy being wasted as heat that gets absorbed into the engine block and must be taken away by the cooling antifreeze and the radiator.

In real world practice, just exactly how much of that would-be wasted heat energy is actually converted into useful mechanical energy?
In other words just how much more power is actually produced by thermal barrier coating?

And in nitrous or boosted applications, assuming that the coating has improved such that it will not flake off, how effective is that coating in protecting the pistons, valves, and combustion chamber?

908ssp

Another thing to consider is with the coatings you can run a more powerful mixture. So the coating itself may not be giving you more power but the piston becomes capable of handling more heat and therefore more power. There are other examples of this in engine tuning.

I see it is being used in many of the high priced race cars. But they may be changing pistons every week which doesn't do the average guy much good.

The fact is these days you can get any amount of power you want just depends on what you want to spend. And when you're spending money on coatings it just might not be money well spent.

Much of the coating research is done for race classes were everything is so restricted that a small gain is about all you can hope for.