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Here are some pictures of our broken engine. The engine is a 2004 Fazer with a compression ratio of 12.2 and 600cc. We are using an Autorotor supercharger and the highest boost we were using was 0.45 bar. The fuel we were using was E85 but during winter there is only around 70% Ethanol in it. So the knock resistance is lower than the orignial one. We couldn't notice knock tendences at all.
We saw that something was wrong when the engine started to blow white smoke out of the crank case ventilation. The engine could still run so we started the engine several times but as soon as we put load on it it started to blow smoke. After removing the sparkplugs we saw that one was melted and one cylinder was wet. We looked into the cylinder and then we could see that the cylinderwall was damaged. Then we removed the cylinderhead and you can see the result on the pictures.
So, anyone out there in FSAE land have any ideas on the issue? What we found strange was it only happened to one cylinder! Why does it happen only to one cylinder and all the other cylinders were still good? Maybe the compression ratio is too high and it looks like the temperatures are very high in the combustion chamber.
We have received a few opinions from different people and are wondering if anyone else has had the same problems in testing?