Why Do Formula 1 Engines Sound the Way They Do?
Part 3 of 3 (assumes that the reader has at least a rudimentary understanding of basic engine operation)

So given the rules of Formula 1, there are very few things that the manufacturers can do with the accessories of the motor (like forced induction, charge coolers/heaters, auxiliary injection, etc.). They can't increase the displacement, so their best option for increasing power production is revving the motor higher.

So what can you do to get a motor spin faster? Let's take a (non-comprehensive) look:

1.) More cylinders

Why do higher end cars have more cylinders? Why don't they just make a 6.0L 4-cylinder engine? Because the bigger your cylinders (and hence, pistons and valves) are, the more they weigh. The more they weigh, the more inertia they have and the more energy is required to move them (and change their direction). This is why the highest performance sports cars have V8's, V10's, and V12's. The more cylinders you have for a given displacement, the smaller and lighter each reciprocating component can be. Also, since the combustion chambers are smaller, they can burn faster and more efficiently. Heat can also be more precisely regulated in each cylinder when they are smaller.

2.) Combustion chamber

As SteveJ mentioned in the last article's comments, a V10 turning at 18,000 RPM means that the engine turns 300 times a second, and that for each cylinder, there is a firing event 150 times a second. Things get even more complicated when you consider than in each cylinder, only one single stroke is allowed for the fuel to burn. So at 18,000 rpm, a cylinder completes a full intake, compression, ignition, and exhaust cycle in 6.667 milliseconds. Divide that by four and you have a window of 1.667ms during which you can burn your fuel. By comparison, the average human takes around 100-150ms to blink an eye. An ignition in an F1 cylinder occurs so quickly that the human brain would not even be able to register the occurance if it were visible.

To complicate things further, gasoline burns relatively slowly, especially the higher octane varieties used in high performance motors (there is a misunderstanding that high octane fuels contain more energy that lower octanes. This is not true - high octane fuels merely burn slower and have higher flashpoints and vapor pressures). Recalling off the top of my head, I believe gasoline vapor burns in the neighborhood of 5 feet (or is it meters?) per second (someone please correct me on this - I can't seem to find documentation). On top of that, liquid gasoline does not burn - gasoline vapor  burns. What happens to fuel droplets is that the outside of the droplet vaporizes in the heat of the cylinder and burns off the surface from the outside of the droplet to the inside.

But the main point I'm trying to make is that gasoline doesn't burn nearly fast enough on its own to be able to combust thoroughly throughout the entire cylinder within the amount of time it has at full throttle. How do you get the air/fuel mixture to burn faster than it would otherwise on its own? Swirl it. A good cylinder head design will promote the swirl of intake charge such that the flame front propagates quickly and evenly throughout the cylinder. Whenever you see flames coming out of a car's exhaust, that means there is excess fuel in the cylinder that didn't get a chance to burn completely and thus is getting sent out the exhaust while still burning (in a street car this is considered a bad thing).

3.) Eliminating friction

This is another vastly complicated area, just like the cylinder head. Of course there are things like developing lubricants that reduce friction and transfer adequate amounts of heat away from critical areas.

Metallurgy is an interesting area in regards to friction. In order to reduce friction between parts, it is my understanding that two parts sliding against each other will have less friction if they are made of different materials. For example, in many cars, the engine block and the pistons are made of aluminum because of its low density. However, an aluminum piston sliding against an aluminum cylinder wall generates more friction than if the cylinder wall was made out of iron or some other material. For this reason many engines have cast-in or pressed-in cylinder liners made of a different material than the pistons and its rings.

Another method of reducing friction is to lessen the amount of surface area on the bearings and rotating surfaces. Thus, make the bearings smaller and the cam profiles narrower. This has an impact on engine reliability, which opens up a whole new can of worms that the engineers have to deal with.

4.) Reducing weight

Reducing weight is a common theme in any aspect of vehicle performance, whether you're talking about reducing weight in the suspension, chassis, or engine. More weight means you require more power to overcome the inertia of the object to move it, stop it, or change its direction.

In a Formula 1 powerplant you have some principle moving parts: the pistons, connecting rods, camshafts, rockers, lifters, gears, bearings, and crankshaft. The lightening regimen is the usual for most of these parts: make them smaller, thinner, or make them out of exotic materials.

Metallurgy
As with making anything smaller or thinner, you trade off strength and/or stiffness of the part. Thus, you also need to develop new manufacturing techniques to further improve the strength of the components when you attempt to lighten them. Forging is a very popular way to produce strong metals. By hammering pieces into shape (as opposed to pouring molten metal into a mold), the molecular structure of the metal is aligned such that molecular bonds are stronger. The best example of forging is in knives or swords. You don't see swordsmiths pouring liquid metal into sword molds - you see them hammering it. I'll discuss later in another article why forged components are awesome.

Tempering a metal compenent after it is forged is also a critical step to adding additional strength to the part. Tempering is the rapid cooling of a part. In the case of the swordsmith, when he dunks the hot orange sword into a water or oil bath, that is tempering the sword. He does this for a reason, not because he is impatient and doesn't want to leave the sword or knife out on the table to cool like an apple pie. Heat treating is almost the same as tempering, except when a part is heat treated, it is not freshly made and soft to begin with. To heat treat a component, you heat it up and rapidly cool it. You usually heat treat a part that has already been machined and finished (whereas you would temper a part that just came hot out of the forge). The science of tempering and heat treating will go in the same future article as forging (and other metal working techniques).

The techniques above help make a part stronger, and in so doing, you can make them thinner and lighter. But what about simply trying other metals? (note: F1 rules prohibit anything other than metals to be used in engines. Composites like carbon fiber cannot be used for engine internals. The crankshaft is even more stringent in that is must be made of a ferrous metal, either steel or cast iron).

Most modern cars use steel or cast iron for many of the internal components since it is relatively strong, stiff, machines well, easier to work with, has a low porosity, and is cheap. The main problem with steel is its density - it is quite heavy. While F1 cars still use many steel components, the steel that is used is a highly specialized pure steel that must be manufactured under the tightest of conditions. Only a handful of foundries around the world are capable of producing such high grade steels, and unfortunately, Formula 1 teams must often compete with the limited availability of the steel with the aerospace industry.

The other widely used structural metal is aluminum (or "aluminium" for you British folk), which has 2/3 the density of steel for the same yield strength. However, for the same yield strength as steel, you need to use a greater volume of aluminum (which will still be 2/3 as heavy as an equivalent steel part). Aluminum also has a lot of undesirable aspects: its softness, its low stiffness, its elasticity, its porosity, its higher coefficient of thermal expansion (it expands more rapidly when heated than other metals) and its rapid decrease in strength at elevated temperatures. Aluminum is also an excellent heat conductor, just behind silver and copper (the latter two not being ideal for mechanical and cost reasons, of course). Thus, aluminum is used extensively in the engine where large masses of it are required - namely, the engine block, heads, and pistons.

Titanium is another one of those wondermetals that everyone talks about. It is as strong as steel but weighs 43% less. It has good hardness, stiffness, and tensile strength, which makes it used extensively in the connecting rods and valves. It is not, however, used to make the valve springs.

Magnesium is even lighter than aluminum, but is less stiff, softer, and its metal shavings are incredibly flammable. Magnesium is used sparingly, such as on valve covers and such, but is not used in structural or moving components. Gary Savage of BAR said of magnesium, "it's not really an engineering material, it's more like cheese."

While a typical aluminum V8 engine in a sports car may weight around 400 or more pounds, the weight reduction regime in Formula has driven the weights of the powerplants to under 200 pounds.

5.) Valvetrain

At 18,000 rpm, the components are moving so fast that they would not be visible to the human eye. The pistons, valves, and cam lobes would simply appear as a blur. Since the valves are moving so quickly, they must be able to be opened and shut in a controlable manner. Normally, when an engine is tuned to run faster, stiffer valve springs are used. A stiffer spring is needed to prevent valve float, where the spring is not pressing hard enough on the valve and it never fully closes before the cam lobe comes around again to open it back up. However, stiffer springs also means that the engine must work harder to open the valves, and power is lost. At the astronomical speeds that F1 engines run at, metallic valve springs cannot be made stiff enough nor have a fast enough rate of return. To remedy this, pneumatic valve springs are used. They are basically charged with nitrogen to keep the valves shut at high speeds without too much loss of power. They also won't fatigue and break down the way metallic valve springs can. When starting up a Formula 1 car, there is somebody who is responsible for ensuring that the nitrogen tank for the valvetrain is filled. When an engine is removed from the car, an auxiliary tank must be attached so that the valves don't collapse into the cylinders.

To give you an idea of how quickly an F1 engine can rev up and down due to its superlight components, check out what the Renault engineers did with an engine on the dyno after their championship.

Why Do Formula 1 Engines Sound the Way They Do?
Part 2 of 3 (assumes that the reader has at least a rudimentary understanding of basic engine operation)

In my last article I tried to describe torque and horsepower, and now I'll outline the most common ways to produce more of that coveted horsepower. I'm not a real powertrain engineer, so I can't really detail anything more than what most gearheads will already know. But you're reading this site, so I guess that means you're here to learn something (or at least correct me).

So to produce more horsepower, we need to either produce more torque or raise the rev limit of the motor. Let's go over each:

Torque Production

There's nothing more American that good ol' torque. It is the motivating force that makes vehicles move and what makes cars "easier" to drive. To produce more torque at the flywheel you need to do several things: 1.) increase the amount of force delivered to the crankshaft via the pistons 2.) increase the duration of the applied force to the crankshaft 3.) reduce frictional losses in bearing surfaces and sliding parts 4.) reduce frictional losses in fluids (fluid meaning any substance that is not solid - thus gas or liquid) in lubricating, cooling, and crankcase fluids 5.) eliminating pumping losses in induction of intake air and evacuation of exhaust gases 6.) a whole slew of other crap

*while writing the above list I realized it would be idiotic to try and write a comprehensive article about making torque in one paragraph, considering entire PhDs are devoted to such subjects, so I'm going over the really really basic stuff that I meant to go over to understand why F1 motors don't sound like other motors*

The old adage for the Americans is "there's no replacement for displacement." An engine with a greater displacement implies one or two things about its cylinder geometry: 1.) its bore is larger 2.) its stroke is longer. The bore defines the diameter of the piston and cylinder. The stroke defines the length through which the cylinder travels. Do a little simple math and you can get the volume of one cylinder. Multiply the volume of one cylinder by the number of cylinders you have and you have the engine's total displacement. For those who are not quite sure, displacement defines only the total swept volume of the pistons - it does not factor in the volume of the combustion chambers.

Increasing bore - increasing the bore size increases the surface area of the piston exponentially (i.e., double the bore and the surface area increases fourfold). This is good since for a given cylinder pressure, you'll get more force on the piston. For example, a cylinder with 500psi worth of combusting gases will push down on a piston with a surface area of 6 square inches with a force of 3,000 pounds of force. If you decrease the bore such that the piston is only 3 square inches, you'll only get 1,500 pounds of force acting on the piston. Kind of like a sail - bigger gets more force.

Increasing stroke - increasing the stroke increases the duration during which the combusting gases can act upon the piston. Gases pushing longer on the piston means more torque. Also, due to the simple geometry required of a crankshaft that has a longer stroke, more torque will be produced.

So if you didn't understand all of the above, that's ok, because in actuality, the rules of Formula 1 prohibit teams from increasing the displacement of their motors (i.e. "the easy way out"). Up until recently, F1 motors were restricted to a maximum displacement of 3.0 liters and 10 cylinders. Now they've gone even smaller, to 2.4L V8 engines.

3.0 liters really isn't all that much. After all, that's as big as - or even smaller than - most cars on the road today. BMW can get about 255HP out of its 3.0L inline-6 cylinder engine. General Motors gets about 400HP out of an engine twice that size. Even the mighty Ferrari Enzo ($650,000) pushes out 650HP from a 6.0L engine. But BMW, Ferrari, and Honda have no problem squeezing upwards of 800-900 horsepower out of their little 3.0L powerplants. How do they do it?

Make it scream.

Where the best engine manufacturers in the world like BMW, Ferrari, and Honda have motors that can rev up to 9,000rpm in their production top-of-the-line sports cars, their Formula 1 powerplants can rev up to 18,000rpm and beyond. By spooling up to such stratospheric levels, the engines don't need to produce very much torque, but can accomplish a lot of work in very little time.

To make another analogy, imagine a big weightlifter having to move 500 gallons of water to a tank 100 feet away by carrying buckets. Let's say the weightlifter can carry 10 gallons of water at a time (that's 80 pounds, I think). So it takes him 50 trips, each trip taking 3 minutes. So it takes him 150 minutes to move 500 gallons of water. (I'm just making up numbers - I have no idea how long it would take a real human being). Big brawn, kinda slow. That's the American way.

Now you have a slightly smaller, but nimbler guy. He can carry half as much (5 gallons, or 40 pounds) but runs twice as fast. So in the end, even though he can lift less, he can still move the same 500 gallons in 150 minutes. That's the Japanese way.

Now the Formula 1 way takes the Japanese way to the extreme (because the rules basically dictate that the only way is to do it the Japanese way). This guy might only carry 5 gallons at a time, but each trip takes him 30 seconds. He's done his job in 50 minutes. That's the Formula 1 way.

So next time we'll get into the real "science" of how these engines can spool as high as they can, rather than another dopey entry about guys carrying things.

Why Do Formula 1 Engines Sound the Way They Do?
Basic Concepts in Horsepower and Torque
Part 1 of 2 (or maybe 3)

Even if you're not into racing, nearly anybody can recognize the distinctive wail of an F1 car driving around a circuit. At least other cars like NASCAR stock cars and Le Mans cars sound like muscle cars or sports cars, but what is it about the F1 engine that makes it sound like a banshee?

Well first let's start off with the concept of horsepower and what it takes to produce it. To begin, we'll start off the the physical concept known as work. Imagine two people, one person carrying a 1 pound block and moving it 10 feet, the other person carrying a 10 pound block and moving it 1 foot. Who's doing more work?

Yup, it's a trick question - they're both doing the same amount of work. Multiply force by distance and you'll get the amount of work done by a particular system. In the imperial system of weights and measurements, we would define work in terms of foot-pounds*. Both of our hypothetical moving men are doing 10 foot-pounds of work. Now even a mouse can do a million foot-pounds of work given enough time. Make it carry an ounce and let it run for a few months. The ability to do work isn't what's impressive. It's how fast you do it.

James Watt (of steam engine and the watt fame) observed that an average horse could do about 550 pound-feet of work per second, or 33,000 pound-feet of work per minute. That's what defines one horsepower. (I believe that the North American SAE definition of the horsepower is slightly greater than the metric variety, also known as Pferdestärke, abbreviated as PS for all you people who like to watch "Best Motoring" - thus North American HP ratings will always be lower than metric [European and Japanese] ratings)

This is what makes an engine impressive - its ability to do work in a short amount of time. So for example, to get a 4,000 pound car to move a mile (5,280 feet) in 60 seconds, it would take 10.67HP to do it, assuming that there were no frictional losses from air, tires, bearings, etc. [(4000x5280/60)/33000 = 10.667]

So for an engine, there are two variables that you can change. You can't change the distance, but you can change the amount of load you can carry and/or the amount of time that you're carrying that load. Since an engine spins rather than moves in a straight line, we can quantify the "speed" at which the engine is moving by revolutions per minute (RPM). More revs means more speed. On the load side of things, we measure force rotationally by torque. Whereas our moving men applied linear force to carry their 1 and 10 pound loads, an engine applies twisting or torsional force. Torque is measured (in the US) in foot-pounds - this is a different sort of foot-pounds than work though. Imagine a 2 foot long wrench and pushing down with the weight of 1 pound at the end of the handle - that's 2 foot-pounds of torque being applied to the nut. Now imagine a 1 foot long wrench being pressed with 2 pounds of weight at the handle - that's two foot-pounds of torque being applied to the nut also.

So to make more horsepower we can do one or both of two things: produce more torque (like being able to lift a heavier load) or spin faster (like being able to cover a distance in a shorter amount of time). The American way is to produce more torque. The Japanese way is to spin faster. The European way is to do both.

In our next article I'll discuss how we go about producing more torque or how to spin faster.

*Throughout this article I'll interchangeably use foot-pounds and pound-feet. I tend to say pound-feet since the metric is newton-metres, but I've also been influenced by a lot of people who say the alternate. I don't think it really matters what comes first.

ok, finally...

Coolant

This isn't my area of expertise, so if someone has something to add or correct (*ahem*SteveJ), please chime in.

So in the last article we went over the cooling system and why liquid cooling is so superior. So now that we have the cooling system down, what shall we use as the coolant?

Well, what's cheaply available and has a high specific heat capacity? That's right, water! Water makes a great coolant because it can store large amounts of heat given its volume and you can get it anywhere. But, you see, it's not perfect.

As you know, water makes ferrous metals (anything containing iron, such as steel) rust and other metals oxidize and eventually corrode. This isn't such a great thing given that radiators are made of aluminum and engines are made of either aluminum or iron.

But there's a really big problem with water, one that's inherent to its physical nature. It's the fact that it boils at 100C and freezes at 0C (and once frozen doesn't melt until 4C). This is assuming that you're at one atmosphere of pressure. Lower the pressure (like at high altitudes) and it boils at even lower temperatures. This is no good considering that cars have to operate in all parts of the world where the temperature drops below freezing or can get hot enough for the engine to boil the water.

Why is freezing and boiling such a bad thing? For one thing, water expands when it freezes. So water still left in the cooling galleries in the engine would expand with enough force to crack the engine block. Also, it's difficult to crank the engine when the water pump is frozen in a solid block of ice. Boiling is equally bad since it means that much of the coolant is escaping from the engine in the form of vapor. Also, as we noted before, liquid cools better than gas, and boiling water means that there's gas in the cooling system - not very effective.

So how do we get around these problems? With a little high school chemistry (you did pay attention in high school, yes?). If you recall, some materials have colligative properties, which essentially define the temperatures at which substances melt/freeze and boil/condense. You can drastically change these properties just by adding a little bit of a foreign substance.

Here's an example for those of you who live in climates that recieve snow. Every winter they pour salt on the roads to melt the ice and make it safer to drive in. What the salt does is effectively lower the freezing point of water such that it doesn't turn to ice. This only works to a certain point, however, since at extremely low temperatures salt is ineffective and even saltwater will freeze. Boiling point if affected in the same way. Next time you go to make a pot of pasta, let the water come to a boil, then add a pinch of salt to flavor. You'll notice that once you add the salt to the water, the boiling stops. This is because the addition of salt raises the boiling point. So salt affects the colligative properties of water by both lowering the freezing point and raising the boiling point. Sugar does the same thing. So will any other substance you can dissolve in water.

So you see, we need to lower the freezing point of water for all those cold seasons and raise the boiling point for all those hot climates. We could add sugar to the mix, but unfortunately it'll carmalize when the engine gets hot. Syrup in your engine is not a good thing. You could add salt to the water, but it would end up crystalizing out and clogging the engine. We need something that's already in liquid form and doesn't react much under heat or cold.

Enter ethylene glycol and propylene glycol. Both are used in coolants nowadays, but before the past decade, ethylene glycol was used primarily for reasons unknown to me. Problem with ethylene glycol is that exposure to large amounts of it will ruin your kidneys, heart, and central nervous system. It also smells and tastes sweet, which is bad if you have pets. They'll be attracted to the sweetness and will be easily killed by coolant if they drink it up.

Propylene glycol is much more benign and has even been approved for use in food and cosmetic products. I assume that the use of propylene glycol isn't more widespread only because of its cost over ethylene.

So now that we have a substance that will mix with water easily and alters its colligative properties, we need to add a few more goodies.

First, since engines and most of their cooling systems are made of metals, we need an oxidation inhibitor. Basically, something that will prevent iron and steel from rusting and aluminum from oxidizing. I have no idea what specific compound such an inhibitor might be though.

Something else that needs to be added is an anti-foaming agent (engine oil uses this as well, for reasons I'll explain in a future article). Since coolant is being whipped around by a water pump and being carried throught passages in the engine, you don't want any air in the system, since air cools significantly worse than water. Also, water is much easier to pump that foam is. Anti-foaming agents make sure that the coolant doesn't froth up when whipped around by the water pump.

And finally, some other compounds that are very important are surfactants and corrosion inhibitors. Surfactants basically break the surface tension of water and make it stick more easily to other substances. One common example it soap. Pure water will bead up on a glass surface, but just a touch of soap will cause it to spread out. Having the water make better contact with component surfaces helps it transfer heat better. Surfactants also help combat a phenomenon known as cavitation erosion which erodes the surfaces of the water pump and the galleries within the cylinder head.

The corrosion inhibitor is also an important additive, and basically it helps control the acidity/alkalinity of the coolant. If you recall your chemistry, the pH scale defines a pH of 7 to be neutral, whereas anything below 7 is considered acidic and anything above is considered alkaline. Coolant is typically kept between a pH of 8-10, and most modern coolants nowadays are kept near a pH of 8.3. Anything lower and the coolant becomes acidic, which is not good for the metals in the engine. At that point it's time to replace the coolant.

All coolants contain these additives in some combination or another, but coolant engineers usually design their formulas to work best when diluted to a ratio of 50/50 water/antifreeze. Any higher or lower in either direction will not give the optimum properties of cooling, heat transfer, or corrosion inhibition. More coolant is not necessarily always better (30/70 water/coolant is about as far as you should ever go). Straight antifreeze actually freezes and boils faster than pure water, but it's the mixture with water that gives it the extraordinary properties.

Over time, the gycols in the coolant breaks down and interacts with the metals in the engine to become more acidic, spending out the reserve of corrosion inhibitors. At the same time, the oxidation inhibitors and surfactants also lose their effectiveness. The breaking down of these compounds is why it is necessary to periodically replace your coolant.

Now you may have heard about "long life" coolants, which need not be replaced for up to 150,000 miles, unlike traditional "green" coolants which may only last 40,000 miles. The only major difference between the two types of coolants is that the corrosion inhibitors in the "orange" type of coolant last longer than the ones in the green type. Mixing the two won't destroy anything in the car, it just means that the contaminated coolant will have even less anti-corrosion power as any of the pure coolants.

Antifreeze is actually clear when it is manufactured, but the companies add different colored dyes to identifiy them (the color is not a result of any of the formulations). Colors can range from green to yellow to red to pink. Just make sure that you use the type your car came with, and if you happen to make a mistake and mix them, don't freak out. You should flush the system just to get pure coolant into the system, but your car won't explode the next day.

And that's the chemistry of the stuff you pour into your radiator.

*ADDENDUM* The cooling system is also kept sealed and under pressure. Increasing pressure actually raises the boiling point of water even more (which is the principle of the pressure cooker). This is why your radiator cap has warnings of personal injury and doom if you open the cap while the engine's still hot. The steam would be superheated to beyond temperatures you would normally encounter in say, a pot on your stove, and you could be seriously injured.

*Fun Fact* The toxicity of ethylene glycol can be neutralized with ethanol, aka ethyl alcohol, aka Jack Daniels. You could theoretically take a shot of antifreeze and then a shot of alcohol soon after to prevent yourself from dying. Not that I would recommend this practice. But according to a grad student in my department, that was the "cool" thing to do at Vanderbilt - chug antifreeze and alcohol to see who could take the most without dying. Seems like a fun game, eh?

Ok, back to the grind:

The Cooling System

The original intention was to just briefly describe the cooling system before going into detail about the different types of coolants, but then this in itself turned into a full article. Next one will be about coolants.

As we all know, engines burn fuel to create energy in the form of movement and heat. In truth, we really don't need all that heat (except on a cold winter day) - just moving the car is all that's really desired. Of course, heat is one of the many byproducts of the combustion process, and like any byproduct, you need to dispose of it.

In the early days, fins were cast into the engine block to increase the effective surface area of the block. This allowed air moving over the engine to help cool it down. Two companies most notable for holding onto air cooling the longest are Porsche and Harley Davidson. You can see the fins cast into the block of this Harley motor here:

Though simple and cheap to design and implement, there are a number of flaws with air cooling:

1.) It is simply not efficient enough at shedding heat when the engine is run hard
2.) In large multi-cylinder engines it makes it almost impossible to remove heat from certain regions
3.) Cooling is uneven
4.) Temperature cannot be regulated
5.) Probably some other aspect I forgot. Feel free to chime in.

So how do we combat these shortfalls? You guessed it, liquid cooling! Now liquid cooling doesn't mean that you spray water all over the engine, but you use a liquid to help transfer heat from where you don't want it to where you do.

Unlike air cooled engines, liquid cooled engines have entire systems dedicated to the removal of waste heat. A water pump is driven by the engine and moves coolant throughout the system. Passages are cast into the engine block to allow coolant to flow through vital sections of the engine, where it then passes through a radiator. The radiator is what makes the rapid disposal of heat possible. By having rows of tubing connected by extremely thin metal vanes, the surface area of the radiator is huge, which makes convection of heat into the environment much more efficient than a single large block of metal (like an engine).

From Cartalk

Liquid cooling remedies all of the problems described above. In addition, the coolant can be routed to a smaller radiator (called the heater core) to provide heat for the climate control system. On most modern cars, the engine coolant is routed through the throttle body to keep it warm so that it does not freeze stuck during cold weather. Early versions of Cadillac's Northstar engines even routed coolant through the alternator since the cars had such high electrical demands.

A thermostat is responsible for regulating the engine's temperature and allows coolant to flow to the radiator at a predetermined temperature. The radiator also has one or more fans mounted to it to allow cooling even when the vehicle is not in motion and there is no airflow.

Engineers must properly design the cooling system to be able to handle the loads produced by the engine and its accessories in the worst possible situations. The more fuel a motor consumes, the more heat it produces. Other fluids, such as transmission oil and sometimes power steering fluid, are also cooled by the radiator. The air conditioning system also uses its own radiator that is stacked in front of the powerplant's radiator. The radiator must be large enough to be able to convect away all of the engine's waste heat, even at extremely high temperatures that the car may be driving through. The water pump must be able to adequately flow coolant in order to transport heat, although pumping too fast can be just as inefficient as pumping too slowly.

In addition, modern radiators contain small fins inside the coolant lines that cause the flow of coolant inside the radiator to become turbulant. Turbulance helps to extract as much heat as possible from the coolant in the same way stirring a cup of coffee will release heat faster.

And in our next edition, we'll cover coolant, promise.