Ford and Flame Spray Industries

[toddwxyz]

Ok let's see who knows the scoop on this one.....

Back in 2009.....

ENERGY-EFFICIENT ENGINE TECHNOLOGY WINS FORD TEAM NATIONAL INVENTOR OF THE YEAR AWARD

The Intellectual Property Owners Education Foundation is honoring the inventors of the Ford-patented Plasma Transferred Wire Arc (PTWA) technology used to apply coatings on engine cylinder bores with the 2009 National Inventor of the Year Award

Ford’s PTWA thermal spray coating process for aluminum engine blocks replaces heavy cast iron liners which improves an engine’s fuel efficiency by reducing engine weight and internal piston friction losses

Ford has 95 issued and pending patents related to the new PTWA coating technology and will introduce it on its North American powertrain lineup within the next year

 

Here's the source:

http://media.ford.com/article_print.cfm?article_id=30443

 

So.......is Ford applying PTA bore spray in production now? If so, on which engines?

[Mad Hatter]

GT 500 5.4

[blksn8k2]

Nissan was actually the first manufacturer to use this technology on a production engine in the 2009 3.8L twin-turbo V6 GT-R. However, they are using it under a license agreement with Ford since Ford has multiple patents on the process.

[Ford Jellymoulds]

That good news self lubricating diesel engines that last for ever anyway will now come with a million mile guarantee's as standard if friction is reduced even more. I thought engines with cast iron liners with lots of graphite vitamins added disappeared ages ago.

[blksn8k2]

GT 500 5.4

 

And if the rumors are true it is soon to be increased to 5.8L which makes sense since the liner can now be much thinner with the PTWA process which would in turn allow for a larger bore size in the same block.

[Moosetang]

Here's an article with a picture of a PTWA-coated block cut-away for your engineering porn pleasure. Edited May 31, 2011 by Moosetang

[blksn8k2]

I know the use of PTWA on the GT500 block has been discussed before but I would be more interested in knowing what future engines Ford is planning to use it on. The GT500 is a relatively low production vehicle and so is the Nissan GT-R. I suppose that makes some sense to test the process in low volume applications where the company might be less exposed to warranty claims. The fact that these are high performance vehicles with highly stressed forced induction engines suggests that the manufacturers are not too concerned about durability but I wonder how many buyers of these expensive vehicles are not exactly thrilled to be the test dummies or how many sales were lost because of potential buyer's fears. The fact that Ford is buying the pre-sprayed blocks from an outside vendor (Honsel) suggests that there may also be some production issues that have kept Ford from doing blocks in-house or in higher volumes. The process has been around for nearly three model years and we have yet to see it used in any high volume applications even though there have been several new or updated engines put into production during that same timeframe. Combining this process with the next generation of EcoBoost engines (1.6L & 2.0L) would seem like a logical next step.

[2b2]

...Combining this process with the next generation of EcoBoost engines (1.6L & 2.0L) would seem like a logical next step.

2.3EB first tho