Prof Blair & Associates Home Page

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).

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 800x600 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