4stHEAD SYSTEMS and COMPONENTS DESIGN and ANALYSIS v11

4stHEAD is a software package for the design of the components within and attached to the cylinder heads of 4-stroke engines.

This simulation program deals with many aspects of engine design related to the cylinder head. It can be applied to a wide variety of situations from simple industrial engines to complex racing engines. The extensive engine development experience of Prof. Gordon P. Blair and Hans Hermann is harnessed to provide a very powerful design tool.

Areas included in the program are: valve lift design; valve lift profile design leading to cam design and cam profile design and cam manufacture and cam profile output to check both quality and accuracy of cam grinding; output from cam design to manufacture cams by both conventional commercial cam grinding and by in-house CNC grinding or preparation of master cam profiles; valve lift curves; valve spring and valve train dynamics including gas/pneumatic springs; valve timing; combustion chamber layout; the design of valve pockets in piston crowns; and the design of cylinder head contents and its tuned intake and exhaust ducting to achieve target performance characteristics (see below for a more detailed description).

4stHEAD SYSTEMS and COMPONENTS DESIGN and ANALYSIS

• Design of valve lift motion
• Deduction of the design of valve lift motion from a file of measured valve lift data
• Deduction of the design of valve lift motion from a measured cam profile and the known geometry of the cam follower mechanism
• Creationof geometry data files for complex cam follower mechanisms, i.e., finger, rocker and pushrod, for import into other 4stHEAD suite programs
  
• Design and manufacture of the cam profile to provide a given valve lift motion for all types of followers including grinding wheel path and cam profile analysis as output
• Valve train design and dynamic analysis with coil and gas springs for all cam follower mechanisms
• Design of geometric layout of 4-valve head with vertical valves
• Design of geometric layout of 4-valve pentroof cylinder head
• Design of geometric layout of bentroof and pyramid heads
• Design of geometric layout of 2-valve hemi head
• Design of geometric layout of 2-valve wedge head
• Design of geometric layout of 2-valve vertical-valve head
• Design of geometric layout of 2-valve and 3-valve side valve heads
• Design for manufacture – valve pockets in pistons crowns
• Design of cooling fins for air-cooled engines
• Design of a cylinder head to provide adequate intake and exhaust gas flow characteristics and to export the exhaust and intake valve lift files directly to engine simulation software such as VIRTUAL ENGINES™.
• Design of a cylinder head and its intake and exhaust valve(s) and its attached tuned ducting to achieve target performance characteristics from the engine.
• Creation of even more detailed cam manufacturing data than is available through the ‘cam manufacture’ program

Computer Hardware Requirements
4stHEAD requires the following minimum hardware:
CPU:                  Intel Pentium 333MHz or faster
Memory:             64 Megabytes RAM
Display:              SVGA 800×600 or higher
Mouse:               Any Windows mouse
Hard Disk Space:  At least 10 Megabytes of free space

Computer Software Requirements
4stHEAD requires the following software:
Operating System: Microsoft Windows