ALL ABOUT THE ENGINE

The University of Wisconsin-Madison team increases engine displacement and implements exhaust gas recirculation to maintain winning ways in SAE Clean Snowmobile Challenge.

THE 2015 SAE CLEAN SNOWMOBILE competition season was a triumphant end to a great design cycle for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Clean Snowmobile Team. Our 2015 design started with a 2013 Ski-Doo MXZ Sport Rotax 4-stroke 600 ACE to which we implemented many engineering improvements.

Among those improvements was a turbocharged Miller Cycle, which kept the intake valves open longer. This lowered the dynamic compression ratio and decreased pumping work losses at mid-load and mid-speed ranges. To address a cylinder filling imbalance caused by use of the turbocharger, the snowmobile also had a custom student designed split plenum intake manifold, which could keep two separate manifolds for each cylinder or be combined into one large manifold depending on speed and load.