How does a Lamborghini supercar engine stay cool?
Engine cooling is very important to every vehicle especially supercars. How does a Lamborghini supercar engine stay cool? We have answers. There was a time when air cooling was still popular on some performance cars. Air cooling does have some advantages. There is less spinning mass to worry about (no water pumps) and less weight too as you don’t have to worry about carrying around a water-cooling system.
The drawback is that it can be inefficient, and unless you employ fans, it doesn’t work very well when the car is moving. That’s why all modern supercars, and all modern cars in general, are water-cooled. More accurately they are coolant-cooled, but since that coolant’s number one ingredient is water, water-cooled has become the nomenclature.
Advantages of water cooling in a supercar
Having a cool engine actually lets you have more power. The cooler the air coming in, the more power you can gain when the air and fuel mixture erupts. This means the cooler your engine stays, the cooler that mixture will be until the engine is ready to detonate it.
With water cooling, you can cool very specific parts of the engine very quickly. Cooling is about surface area. With air-cooled engines, even with fins, there is limited surface area and air doesn’t conduct heat as well as water. With the water inside the engine, you have more surface area and a better cooling medium.
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What do water cooling and air cooling have in common?
Actually, both cooling methods require air. Water cooling just funnels the air though a high-surface-area radiator. Because of this, both systems can actually have difficulty when the vehicle is still, especially after ripping down the track and then coming to a stop and idling. That’s where Lamborghini came up with a solution called LSMS.
What is Lamborghini LSMS?
LSMS is unique to the new Lamborghini Sián. It stands for Lamborghini Smart Material System. Not that this clears anything up. It’s actually a series of six vents at the back of the car designed to open when the engine bay gets too hot.
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It uses thermal-activated springs to push the flaps open. This lowers the aerodynamic efficiency of the car slightly but increases the engine cooling significantly. Once the engine bay returns to a decent temp, the flaps close again. No electronics involved.
