Atomic Performance Products - XR6T High Performance Conrods Part 2

Atomic billet steel conrods were designed from scratch with one principle in mind; use aerospace quality materials and sophisticated manufacturing processes to produce an extremely strong, light and durable connecting rod for the popular inline 6 cylinder Ford SOHC/DOHC engines, at an affordable price.

The Design and Evaluation Process
The Atomic engineering team set out to address these parameters by designing what many performance engine builders are now calling the finest conrod on the market for the Ford DOHC 6 cylinder engine.

Extensive CAD/CAM computer modelling was employed and produced a H-Beam design, which has an extremely high stiffness-to-mass ratio. The next step was to pick the correct materials, heat treatment and surface treatment processes to ensure durability under rigorous performance applications.

Next came FEA modelling (Finite element analysis) to simulate stresses on the conrods. This also entailed weighing every piston, gudgeon pin and ring set on the market and loading this information, plus stroke, rotating and reciprocating conrod values into our computer modelling software to calculate the stresses.

The greatest load exerted on a conrod in an engine producing 600 comes not from the force of normal combustion but from the tensile force exerted by the piston at top dead centre (TDC). At 5250 RPM the piston exerts a tensile load on the conrod of 1908 gs (-1693 kgs) at split overlap TDC reversal. If you increase maximum engine speed by only 1000 RPM to 6250 RPM, the TDC tensile load rises by 50.4% to 2870 gs. At 7500 RPM the tensile loading increases to 4132 gs, clearly demonstrating the Atomics design strength of 8000 gs means it has plenty in reserve.

Excessive loads at TDC are brought about by a high reciprocating mass and/or by increasing engine RPM, so it is essential to design reciprocating engine components with the lowest mass possible to minimize premature lower bearing shell bearing failure. This is particularly relevant to our customers who are turning their engines to 7500RPM+.

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