Bugatti Has Developed A V16 Engine!

Bugatti has done it again just when I thought the combustion

engine

had peaked with all future development veering towards electrification Bugatti announces a V16

engine

yes, that's what it looks like and it's something we haven't seen in cars from production in more than 80 years. Bugatti was crazy enough to develop a W16 putting it among the only 16-cylinder production passenger cars of the 21st century and they're still at it with a new V16 on the way, although confirmed specs are slim there's actually a lot to look for. we can learn from the published images. We will dive into all the details of the V16, but to really understand this engine we must go back and understand how we got here, starting with the unique masterpiece that is the Bugatti Veyron w16 engine, so it all starts with the Bugatti Veyron which had a 8.0 l.

The w16 engine was essentially two vr8s at a 90° angle and these vr8s had a 15° angle between each bank of cylinders, so we have four turbochargers and in the most powerful version of the Veyron superport this generated 12,200 metric horsepower 6400 RPM 1500 NM of torque from 3 to 5,000 RPM with a redline of 6500 RPM the big advantages here tons of power huge engine very exclusive quad twin turbo vr8 design worthy of entering an elite level of Supercar now it is not exactly accurate to describe This style of engine is very compact, but putting 16 cylinders in this configuration compared to a V16, it's actually quite compact in terms of the dimensions and the size of this engine, so as we go from the Veyron to the Shiron, does it? how this W16 evolved and many of the The specs look the same, right, it's still an 8L w16, you still have those two VR8s at 90° V and you still have quad turbochargers, but you'll notice it has a lot more power: 1600 horsepower metric and 1,600 newon met of torque, so there is more torque. too and a slightly higher redline, so how can they make so much more power?

Well, the big change came with the turbochargers. Two changes here, firstly the turbos were 69% larger, the second thing they did is that they are now using sequential turbos, so instead of each group of four cylinders having its own turbocharger as seen here in The Veyron, now has a shared exhaust manifold for each cylinder bank, so what they are doing here is using sequential turbos at low RPM. The eight cylinders are discharged into a turbocharger. When you get to higher RPM, you open this valve here and then use both turbochargers to create boost at that higher RPM and compound this as you accelerate from low RPM to high RPM. slowly open that valve and then use both turbochargers to maintain that boost, this gives you better low end response, better low end torque and then still allows you to have that massive top end using both turbochargers, so if you notice the torque In corners, it's really interesting what they did here because if you look at the previous one with the Bugatti Veyron, you can see that it's a pretty narrow section of maximum torque, around 2000 RPM for maximum torque.

There we are using the sequential turbocharger strategy, you scale it up. so much so that you have a lot more useful torque at the bottom end and more useful torque at the top end, more than double that maximum torque range, so if you were to just run the two turbochargers in a larger size, yes, you would get more torque before on and that lower RPM range before, but that torque would decrease as it went up to those higher RPMs and those two turbochargers became restrictive, so you change to this four turbo design, which yes, if you only use four turbos like you did before, but they were bigger, well you would have less torque at the bottom end following this dotted line right here before you get to the top end, so you combine both by eliminating those disadvantages by using sequential turbos to have that huge curve of torque flat, okay, so if you look at the progression from Veyron to Chiron, the performance goals were not only to increase torque but also to widen the torque curve, which means not only more power but a wider power range. useful.

Keep those goals in mind as we move toward the next Evolution with the V16. Alright, let's dive into the V16. Now the history of the V16 as far as production cars are concerned is very short. It all starts with the Cadillac V16. Yes, it's called that because it had a V6 that existed in the 1930s. Now it had a 45° angle. for that V and you might be wondering why use a 45° angle, you want to divide all of your power strokes between the cylinders evenly, so if you want to calculate the firing interval, look at the number of strokes this engine It has four strokes. multiply that by 180 Dees, so that for each power stroke you have 720° of crankshaft rotation and divide that by the number of cylinders, which will give you 720 ID 16 45° in other words, you will have one cylinder firing every 45 degrees of crankshaft rotation, why?

Is it so important to the design of that V-well when one of those pistons that share a common crank pin is at top dead center, since the crankshaft rotates 45 degrees more, the piston it is aligned with on the other side will be on top? neutral, so you can use both to have that 45° separation with your firing interval, so Cadillac is essentially using two inline 8s at a 45° angle, but to characterize Bugatti's V16, I would say which is more like two. The V8s connected to each other with the banks at a 90° angle, so how did I get there?

When looking at the new engine, you will notice that there are now numerical labels for each of the cylinders, if you have an engineering degree and an advanced knowledge of mathematics, like me, you will notice that three is not the number that comes after one and not to brag, but I also noticed that 11 also doesn't come after one, it's usually done by the number two, which is all the way down here, so Bugatti has a It's really hard to count or do these numbers represent something completely resembling order V16 trigger. Okay, so how does this firing order tell us what a 90° V is?

Well, you can see that one and three are facing each other, which means you're going. for one cylinder to fire, then 45° of crankshaft rotation, another cylinder fires, then 45° of crankshaft rotation and this cylinder fires, meaning you have 90° of crankshaft rotation between these two cylinders which now share a crank common if that is the same pin as them. They are sharing that it is not divided, that means you have a 90° V. The next thing that stood out with the numbers on the engine is that all the odd numbers were on one side while all the even numbers were on the other side. which means it alternates firing from one side to the other odd side even side odd side even side so we have our odd side labeled our inside even labeled B and splitting it and creating these two separate V8s which we're going to find out are two V8s crossplane, right, this is a bit tedious to understand, however, what we are doing is very simple, we have our two lines of cylinders, we have divided them in half, we are labeling them 1 to 4 5. - 8 1 a 4 5 to 8 and for each of these we are going to recreate the firing order as if it were just a V8 engine.

Well, for our V16 engine one correlates to one of our early V8 engines and then number two correlates. with six on our B V8 engine, then three correlates to five on our aviate engine and then four correlates to three on our bv8 engine so you can watch as you do this for all the firing orders for each of these two V8s, gets each of these firing orders for the individual V8s now, what does that tell us? With a crossplane V8 you tend to fire the outer cylinders than the inner cylinders. Here's a simple picture showing what it looks like, so again you have the outer cylinders firing and then the inner four cylinders firing, then the outer four, and then the inner four on a flat crankshaft.

You see it alternate between two cylinders on the outside, two cylinders on the inside, two cylinders on the outside, two cylinders on the inside, so here you can see these shots. orders and see that two and three and six and seven are all grouped here, which means it goes in, out, in, out, the same as B 6 and three, 7 and two are the internal ones, they all group together, so what goes in, out, in, out, as far as it shoots. order, that tells us that this is a crossplane V8 now, again, looking at these numbers, you might say, wait a minute, why is this firing order different from this firing order and it's actually just a mirrored V8 for balance things? for example, we go from 5 to four, okay, we draw an arrow from 5 to four, then we go from 8 to 7, 8 to 7, then we go from 2 to 6, we draw an arrow from 2 to six, then an arrow from 3:1. so we draw that arrow from 3 to 1, if you do the same on this one, you'll go from 3 to 7, okay, there's the arrow from 3 to 7 and you can see they perfectly mirror all of these arrows, perfectly mirrored each other. so you're balancing things and you're alternating when this one fires the outer cylinders this one fires the inner cylinders when this one fires the outer cylinders this one fires the inner cylinders so they reverse things mirror it everything balances out and it's a nice happy V16 engine, it's Well, there is one more critical detail we need to understand for all of this to work, so if we go from odd on this side to even on this side and alternating back and forth each time that means we have 45° of crankshaft rotation between this one and this one, so for that to work, it means that this crankshaft has to be offset 45° from this crankshaft, so if you were to look at it from the bottom from the side, you would see a cross for one of the crankshafts at that time so that that ignition interval determine where it goes forward and reverse, then you would have a 45° switch on that cross crankshaft for the other V8 engine, all the right time to Let's face it, remac, Bugatti's CEO posted some photos of a prototype engine on Facebook, so we have some images we can analyze.

First, we can see the crankshaft and since two cylinders share a common crankshaft pin, we can confirm based on the firing order. which is a 90° V8 and you can see that it is clearly a crossed crankshaft that in the middle has a 45° offset creating the two V8s that alternate power strokes every 45° of crankshaft rotation. Oh and there is a photo of the engine block where you can turn the eyeball 90° quite easily, so this was all a waste of time since those photos exist, maybe let's move on, it's important to understand that everything Bugatti has informed us so far is that it is a V16 engine and is part of a hybrid powertrain, those are the Reportedly only two things have been confirmed, however there have been private customer presentations where more has been disclosed. information, it is supposedly a cworth-

developed

8.3L naturally aspirated V16 that revs to 9,000 RPM and produces 1,000 horsepower.

Alright, I don't really care about the speculation. Instead of learning Bugatti's numbers directly when they decide to reveal them, however, that doesn't mean we can do a little math and just see if these reported numbers actually make any logical sense, so it's a way to compare them using another value. natural. The aspirated engine there is the one that goes in the Gordon Murray t50. It's a 4.0L V12 revving at 12,100 RPM and 654 horsepower, making that peak power at about 11,500 RPM, so let's imagine these numbers are accurate. Our Bugatti will probably reach maximum power for you. we know that 500 RPM or so below the redline, so let's say 8500 RPM, will make 1000 horsepower divided by 8.3 or about 120 horsepower per liter, that's a lot less than the t50, although the t50 is revving more so it's not really a great way to measure them side by side because they rev at different RPM's so what's a better way to do it?

Looking at the average effective braking pressure. An easier way to do this is to simply look at the torque per liter. This is the Gordon R t50 4.0. The L cworth V12 engine generates 299 lbs of torque at its maximum horsepower, so at 11,500 RPM we can calculate the same for the Bugatti if it were generating 1,000 horsepower and that would be 618 lbs of torque at 8500 RPM. Okay, now what is our torque per liter at that peak horsepower number, so for our Gordon Murray t50 that number is 74.7 cfs per liter and for our Bugatti again we're trying to find something close to saying, "Okay , it's realistic, the number ends up being 74.4 foot pounds." per liter, okay, so these numbers are very close to each other, so the numbers are feasible and as far as speculation goes, I'm inclined to believe that it will be naturally aspirated for several reasons, number one, the numbers of power make sense for it to be natural. vacuumed, that's oneindication that we are on the right track number two, looking at the intake manifolds, there are no visible intercoolers and the manifolds, although shared, have split throttles between the two sets of V8s.

If it were turbocharged, you'd probably expect to see a more simplistic style of manifold connecting the eight cylinders of each bank, much like the one seen on the Chiron's turbocharged W16 engine. Number three sounds like a high revving naturally aspirated engine but it's usually hard to confirm objectively and number four when asked about it on a Facebook posting partner, rimx, said translated into English that you're good at response to the hope that the engine will have 1000 naturally aspirated horsepower. You'll also notice that this is in response to having 1,000 electric horsepower, so the setup reportedly has two electric motors up front. you have a 24.8 KW battery in the back, you have your V16 engine paired with another electric motor, each of those electric motors 250 KW or a combined power of 1000 horsepower, so you have your 1000 V16 horsepower, you have 1000 horsepower of The electric motors combine a peak of around 1,800 horsepower, and for the rear they send that power through an 8-speed dual-clutch transmission, so the big question is why what to choose this.The V16 hybrid strategy makes a lot of sense when you think about combining Remac and Bugatti, so the CEO of Bugatti and the CEO of Remac combine their two strengths, electric and combustion, in a high-performance vehicle. performance and also have a truly unique experience.

That's what Bugatti is all about, so you know, while a V16 is big and heavy and will be complicated and expensive, these are things that don't really matter to the Bugatti buyer, and if you start looking, what was the evolution? from the Veyron to the Chiron, they tried to widen that torque curve properly, they wanted to have more torque available over a wider RPM range and what does electrification do for you? Well, you can increase that performance even more and you can have it start at zero so you can have the maximum torque curve here instead of suffering at that low end with the combustion engines, you fill all that with the electric motors and then when You hit those high RPMs, you use that crazy V16 engine to provide the torque. at the top end and you have a much nicer torque curve, uh, although this one was already pretty good, really impressive.

I look forward to seeing more details on this vehicle. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below, thanks for watching.