FrogZ wrote:As long as we are getting technical can someone explain how the flattened part of my Micron serpent headers work.
It's to decrease the difference in gas velocity and pressure between the section of the pipe at the inside of the bend and the outside of the bend.
Let me try an analogy here...
Picture a two-lane roundabout with two cars entering it together from the same direction at the same speed, one in the inside lane, the other in the outside, both of them turning right with the aim being to have them also exit the roundabout neck and neck. The car in the inside lane has a shorter distance to travel around the roundabout than the car in the outside lane, so if they enter the roundabout together, for them to leave it together, the car in the outside lane has to travel faster than the car in the inside lane.
This is what happens inside the bent sections of exhaust pipe. If you take a piece of pipe and you start feeding gas in at one end, if the flow is in a steady state (this doesn't entirely hold true for a cycling engine, which feeds gas in in pulses, but it applies insofar as to explain the cobra-like variation in cross-section in high-end aftermarket header pipes... interestingly, top-shelf systems used by race teams still use circular cross-section tubing throughout), what goes into the pipe at one end has to be matched exactly by what comes out of the pipe at the other end... otherwise, there's either more or less gas leaving than there is going in, and the density of gas inside the piece of pipe is changing as a result; this is not a steady state.
Ok so far?
Now, for a straight piece of pipe, this is a no brainer. Gas entering at any point in the pipe cross-section has the same distance to travel as the gas entering at any other point, so any single cross-sectional "slice" of gas enters and emerges from the pipe together, at the same speed.
But, if we bend the pipe, the gas entering at a point towards the inside of the bend now has a shorter distance to travel than the gas entering at a point towards the outside of the bend, and, as a result, has to flow faster to compensate. What actually happens is that, because flow impedance of a curved path for a flow is proportional to the radius of curvature, the gas towards the inside of the bend slows down and the gas towards the outside speeds up.
This is bad for an exhaust because it creates a density, and hence pressure differential (gradient, to use the strict terminology) across the cross-section of the gas flow; effectively, the gas gets "stretched" at the outside of the bend and "squished" at the inside. This causes a twofold detrimental effect; first, the gas tries to expand down the direction of the pressure gradient, ie. perpendicular across the pipe cross-section, and the "chafing" of the faster-flowing and the slower-flowing gas on each other causes them to "trip" each other up. Both of these are sources of turbulence, and the flow impedance of a turbulent flow is much greater than the flow impedance of an orderly,
laminar flow. This means that an engine has to spend more of the energy it produces getting rid of its own exhaust gas if the flow of that gas in the engine's exhaust pipe is turbulent than if the flow is laminar. In addition, a turbulent flow has the effect of eroding any pressure waves propagating through it, which means that an engine with turbulent flow in the exhaust won't scavenge its cylinders as effectively as an engine with laminar flow.
The idea behind the hydroformed serpent headers is to reduce the path length difference around the bend between gases at the inside of the bend and the gases at the outside of the bend, so the above-outlined differences in gas speed, and thus the turbulence they cause, are minimised, and they achieve this throughout the rev range.