I ran across this on a vintage BMW forum. Relates to carburettor/intake manifold interface and roughness in the intake porting. Of course it is for a carburetted engine with a throttle body , not a diesel, so may not apply at all. Interesting never the less.
Snowing heavily here this morning, so I'm wasting time poking around the internet.
Cheers
Hugh
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Mismatched bores are actually a good thing and we use them on our race car engines that have carburettors all the time. The physics is as follows:
1) Picture the column of air that is travelling down the carb throat when the intake valve opens, it is moving at quite a fast rate and is laden with fuel.
2) When the intake valve closes the column of air slams into the closed valve. "An object in motion tends to stay in motion"
3) The air now wants to "revert" back up the intake track. This is what is commonly called "reversion".
4) The amount of reversion, time, length, etc is quite dynamic and changes with throttle position, RPM, barometric pressure, etc etc.
We have found after years of working on racing engines that we can put this to work for us! A step in the intake manifold works in two ways:
1) A smaller manifold creates a lower pressure area under the step (in the intake tract) and the lower pressure resists going "back up" into the higher pressure area. We have also found that a larger manifold created positive turbulence and has the same type of anti-reversion benefit, but not as much.
2) It creates turbulence in the incoming charge and this is REALLY good. Yes, I said turbulence IS GOOD for intake tracts!
Years ago many engine builders were flowing their heads with complicated flow benches and new ways to make intake tracts as smooth as possible in order to (so they thought) get a better flow rate. We have one in the back of the shop collecting dust right now! This thinking is wrong. A bit of roughness on the walls of the intake tract breaks the boundary layer of the air. I.e. If you look at any aerodynamics book worth its salt you will see that when a flow is right->left (for explanation purposes) there is a VERY THIN boundary layer actually going the OTHER way (left->right in this case) on the surface of the object (in this case our intake tract). This reverse boundary layer is actually what creates disruptive turbulence and having a non-smooth surface helps break the boundary layer and increases flow rate.
I will not go further into the physics behind it and the "amount of roughness", and the "amount of turbulence", because it depends on a myriad of factors.
In other words, if you have a step where the manifold is SMALLER than the intake tract that is the best scenario. We have also seen that using a manifold that is larger than the intake holds benefits but not as much as the smaller one.
In other words, don't worry about it! :-)