CamCalc

Last update: March 22, 2007

Ruler

This page will generate a table of lift figures for a harmonic cam from values entered in the fields below. The lift table is used in machining the cam profile by the milling method (see Page 7 of the Feeney Construction series for a description of this process). The following links provide more detailed information. The links from the parameter labels explain what is required for each.

Warning!

This page has been tested with IE6 and Firefox 2.0.0.3 only. Other browsers may have problems.

It requires that your web browser be configured to execute Javascript, and run a Java (tm) Language "Applet" in order to calculate and view the results. If either of these features are disabled in your environment, nothing bad will happen—in fact nothing at all will happen!

The meaning of the input variables and their limits are listed below. You can also click on the label to the left of any input field to find out what and why it is. The form does reasonable input variable validation, as does the underlying program that performs the math, but I'm sure it's possible to fool it if you try hard enough. I don't particularly care as (1) The calculations are run on your box, not my server, and (2) I won't have to machine the crazy thing you've produced!

Base Circle Radius

This is the radius of the circle where the cam follower rides when no valve lift is being applied. The program does not recognize "undercut", but you can subtract this if you wish when machining your cam. Enter as inches or millimetres.

Valve Lift

This is the total amount of lift the cam will apply to the cam follower, above the base circle radius. Enter as inches or millimetres.

Cam action angle

This is the number of degrees from beginning of lift to the end (in between the points where the flank radii tangentially touch the base circle). Note this is not the crankshaft rotation figure sometimes used when quoting timing figures for four-stroke cycle engines; that would be twice the cam action figure. The program will only accept a maximum value of 180 degrees for this parameter. If you don't know it, but do know the nose radius, take a guess starting at say 130 degrees, then adjust the figure until the calculated nose radius matches the one for your cam.

Flank radius

The program will assume that both rising and falling flanks are the same, then use this figure, together with the base circle and lift to calculate the nose radius required to tangentially join four circles into a continuous harmonic cam. If you want a flat sided cam, just enter a very large figure for the flank radius. Enter as inches or millimeters.

Table row increment

This is the interval in degrees between rows of the generated table. You should set it to the value you want to advance your rotary table between cuts. The program requires integers for this figure, so decimal parts of a degree will be ignored.

Engine Speed

This parameter has no impact on the lift calculation. You may ignore it if you only want a lift table. Once the lift figures have been calculated, the instantaneous velocity and acceleration of the cam follower can be calculated for a given a specific engine speed. The acceleration can be used to select the correct "rate" for the valve spring, provided the actual engine cam follower is a mushroom (see
Theory). The tables of figures can also be used to plot the curves for the cam using a simple spreadsheet. If the mood takes me, I may enhance the Java Applet to plot these from the displayed data.

Note: CamCalc assumes the cam is used in a four-stroke cycle engine where the cam gear rotates at one-half engine speed. Hence the value entered here is halved to calculate angular velocity of the cam. Textbooks tend to give examples quoting the camshaft speed—reasonable as the textbooks generally are considering only the cam and follower, not their possible inclusion as part of a four-stroke engine. So be warned if you are validating output against such a text.

Operation

The first four parameters are mandatory. If omitted, the table increment will default to every degree and the engine speed will be set to 5000 rpm. You'll notice that the nose radius is not requested. This will be calculated from the lift, base circle, flank radius, and cam action angle figures to ensure that the cam being modelled is physically accurate, which it might not be if you were permitted to input a nose radius as well. The generated table will show the calculated nose radius used to enable you to cross-check that it is the value expected.

The parameters may be input in metric or imperial by selecting the appropriate Radio Button at the top of the form. The only effect is in regard to how the values in the lift column of the table is formatted, and how velocity and acceleration are presented. Imperial users will see lift as thousandths of an inch, rounded to three decimal places, with velocity and acceleration in ft/sec, and ft/sec2. Metric values for lift will be displayed rounded to two decimal places, with velocity and acceleration in meters/sec, and meters/sec2. Acceleration due to gravity should be the same in both cases, modulo the internal approximations for acceleration due to gravity used.

Acknowledgements

The basic concept for this program came from an article by Rodrick Jenkins called Cam Design for Four-stroke cycle Engines other than Radials that appeared in Strictly Internal Combustion Magazine (ISSN 10446567), Volume 3, Issue #18, page 3. Without this article, the tool would probably not exist—even though the algorithms used now are very different from those employed by Mr Jenkins. His published program (in BASIC, a flawed and dangerous computer language when used for non-trivial applications) generates the correct values for tangential lift of a "mushroom" cam follower on a harmonic cam, but the acceleration and velocity figures are wrong. Nevertheless, v1.0 of the program enabled the cams for the Feeney to be milled. V1.1 uses equations from an undergraduate mechanical engineering text and the implementation at least produces the same results as the worked example in the text: Bevan, Thomas (ed.): The Theory of Machines, p288 et seq.

Theory

There are three basic types of cam shape: Parabolic, Cycloidal, and Harmonic. The general shape of the lift and velocity curves with respect to rotation differ for the three. The CamCalc program currently handles only harmonic cams. These have six parameters:

  1. Base circle radius
  2. Nose circle radius
  3. Rising Flank circle radius
  4. Falling Flank circle radius
  5. Action angle
  6. Maximum cam lift

Some cams are designed with an amount of "dwell" by modifying the nose to introduce a period where maximum lift is sustained. We will not consider these here.

The rising and falling flank radii are generally the same. Regardless, all parameters are related such that there is only one shape that fits all. Change one, and one or more of the others must change too. Modelling a physical thing mathematically can present challenges when the user's inputs "don't add up". This could be due to rounding errors of decimal values, or even a set of values that contain an irrational number! Jenkins apparently side-stepped this potential problem by omitting a parameter which, even though it is probably known, can be readily calculated from the remainder. In this way, his model must be correct and the figures derived from the model will be consistent—I'm making this assumption as the only rational reason he could have had for always calculating the nose radius even though it would almost certainly be known by a user. Alternately, the cam operating angle could be omitted and calculated from the others, or the flank radii, given base circle, nose radius, lift and opening angle.

After the cam parameters are known, our program is going to calculate a table of rotation verses incremental cam lift for a fully tangential follower (often called a mushroom follower) whose axis is in line with the rotational axis of the cam. This is useful and essential when making a cam by milling as described in Page 7 of the Feeney Construction series. Given the lift, velocity and acceleration can be calculated by applying the angular velocity, or averaging for a specific cam rotation speed. The SIC program used averaging, and managed to get it rather wrong, IMHO.

The acceleration figures produced by the tool here could be useful in determining the spring rate required to keep the follower in contact with the cam, given the mass of the components being actuated, but only if the actual cam follower is fully tangential—ie, a flat surface broad enough so that the edge never rides on the cam. The math used to calculate lift for other follower shapes—typically point contact (seldom used), or roller type followers, is well known, I just haven't implemented it, yet. Many model engines use a spherical follower (or something approximating spherical). This is equivalent to a roller follower and would produce very different lift, velocity, and acceleration curves, which are what one would require to estimate the valve spring rate for such a design, but the lift figures for this type of follower could not be used to produce the cam by milling.

All this is to say that the last three columns in the table produced by the CamCalc program in it's present (version 1.1) form, should be taken with a dose of salt. The program, like Mr Jenkins', will give the minimum diameter/width for a mushroom follower that will maintain fully tangential contact. Your design may, or may not have sufficient room to fit such a beast. If I get bored, I may modify the program to accept different sets of input data, generate tables for roller type followers, accommodate an offset follower axis, different radii for rising and falling flanks, etc. But don't hold your breath.

The Effect of Tappet Clearance

Now for a small dose of pragmatism. Anyone who has seen a New-In-Box model four-stroke will probably have noticed the little bag of tools that accompanies it. One of these tools is a feeler gauge that is used to set the tappet clearance. Generally, this is performed by loosening the tappet adjusting screw in the rocker and adjusting its position until the feeler gauge slips firmly but freely between the rocker nose and valve top. Obviously this introduces some "slop" into the train of parts that actuates the valve.

This clearance is very necessary in order to account for thermal expansion of components, principally the valve itself. If this is not done, expansion may lift the valve off its seat—not good for hopefully obvious reasons. The cylinder will also expand, although in most geometries, this will tend to compensate for valve expansion. But keeping the valve head firmly on its seat when not "on the cam" is of prime importance, so the tappet clearance is very necessary. The amount of clearance depends on many factors, but given the sizes and materials typical of our model engines, 0.002" to 0.005" is common.

Introducing tappet clearance effectively places a gap between the cam-follower and the cam. In the diagram here, the gap induced by the tappet clearance has been exaggerated for clarity. Recall that in designing our cam, we specified the opening angle so that the flanks would be tangential to the base circle at the points defined by the cam opening angle, under the assumption that the cam follower would faithfully and exactly follow the cam profile and lift would commence at the desired points (the green lines).

By adding tappet clearance, there will now be a delay before the follower contacts the flank (the red lines). In the diagram above, a clearance of 0.010" has produced the rather extreme reduction of almost 50° in the cam opening angle. This represents a 37% reduction from the design figure. If clearance in the drawing—which depicts the Westbury Kittywake exhaust cam—were reduced to the required 0.004", the actual reduction in the cam angle would still be some 14% or 20° with the cam opening angle being 114.7° compared to the 135° we thought we had.

One cure for this problem is to relieve or undercut the base circle by the required tappet clearance. Note we are not reducing the base circle. The cam flanks must still be tangential to the base circle in order to provide the required opening angle. The relief is introduced by a cutting a tangent between the end of the cam flanks on the base circle radius and the relieved base circle (as shown in this diagram). How accurate do we have to be? Well, at model sizes, it's all a bit approximate unless you are a serious performance builder—and hence unlikely to be reading this for more than idle curiosity .

The actual tappet clearance will vary with the engine's operating temperature, and to a degree, so will the cam durations. But from the figures shown above, the need to introduce an allowance for the tappet clearance in the base circle while maintaining the correct location of the flank ends should be obvious.

There is another cure: increase the "distance" between the open and close points to compensate for the tappet clearance. This is not as "hit and miss", if you'll pardon the pun, as it sounds, especially if you can model the thing in a CAD package. All the usual problems of juggling flank radii and nose radius to achieve the new cam angle still apply, and the acceleration figures produced by CamCalc will go out the window as they assume tangential cam contact starting at the flank to base circle intersection point. In both cases, there will be a hammering effect as the clearance is taken up. That procudes mechanical noise, which some believe adds to the charm of the running engine!

Source Code for the Curious

For the curious, and in the spirit of the Open Source community, the links below provide access to the Java source code for the command-line program that generates the table, and the Applet wrapper used to execute it from this HTML page (use your browser's "view source" if you want to see how the applet is executed).

The approach used in the CamCalc program was derived from an article written by Mr Roderick Jenkins that appeared in in Strictly Internal Combustion magazine, Volume 8, Number 18, dated Dec 1990/Jan 1991. Back issues of SIC are available from the editor/publisher.

 

Ruler

 

Back to Design Center

 

Please submit all questions and comments to enquiries@modelenginenews.org