Photo: FCA
As you know from the Capital Markets Day 2018 conference in Balocco, Fiat Chrysler is betting on electrification for the mid-future as it prepares to phase out diesel from the lineup. But until complete electrification becomes the standard for the Italo-American automaker, internal combustion has to be addressed in order to achiever greater efficiency.
The latest development that Fiat Chrysler is willing to share with us is ACMZ. Also known as 16HT, the aluminum alloy can maintain its strength at temperatures of up to 300 degrees Celsius (572 degrees Fahrenheit). How is this even possible? The engineers decided to replace silicon with copper, and the combination worked out rather well despite the fact this combination tends to crack right after casting.
“When we focused on copper, other people in the industry almost laughed us off, saying we’d never be able to cast that,” said Gregg Black of Advanced Powertrain Engineering at FCA. “We knew there was competition, including other teams working at Oak Ridge National Labs, but we outperformed everyone on this.”
Using copper as the strengthening component of the aluminum alloy isn’t all that new in the world of all things automotive and motorsport, but with the help of the Titan supercomputer (the third most powerful in the United States of America and seventh in the world), the engineers could make the impossible happen. And that impossible, according to the company, is mass production of ACMZ cylinder heads.
“It will still be a few years before ACMZ appears in a production engine,” the automaker highlighted in an official statement. “But FCA has already cast more than 100 cylinder heads with the alloy, using a current production design, and have put several hundred hours of dynamometer testing on some prototypes.”
Compared to the aluminum alloy used by Fiat Chrysler at the present moment, ACMZ costs 7 percent more to produce. The good news is that the copper-aluminum alloy can be cast and machined using existing technologies. $3.5 million of the development budget comes from the government, courtesy of a cooperative research & development agreement.
“When we focused on copper, other people in the industry almost laughed us off, saying we’d never be able to cast that,” said Gregg Black of Advanced Powertrain Engineering at FCA. “We knew there was competition, including other teams working at Oak Ridge National Labs, but we outperformed everyone on this.”
Using copper as the strengthening component of the aluminum alloy isn’t all that new in the world of all things automotive and motorsport, but with the help of the Titan supercomputer (the third most powerful in the United States of America and seventh in the world), the engineers could make the impossible happen. And that impossible, according to the company, is mass production of ACMZ cylinder heads.
“It will still be a few years before ACMZ appears in a production engine,” the automaker highlighted in an official statement. “But FCA has already cast more than 100 cylinder heads with the alloy, using a current production design, and have put several hundred hours of dynamometer testing on some prototypes.”
Compared to the aluminum alloy used by Fiat Chrysler at the present moment, ACMZ costs 7 percent more to produce. The good news is that the copper-aluminum alloy can be cast and machined using existing technologies. $3.5 million of the development budget comes from the government, courtesy of a cooperative research & development agreement.
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