Designing and Testing Cylinder Head Gaskets for High Performance Sealing

The cylinder head gasketing of today's internal combustion engines is highly complex and becoming even more so as the engines are being made lighter while developing higher outputs. Delicate stress distribution balancing between the combustion and liquid sealing components is required. Rigorous testing, both static and dynamic, is required to insure long term, high performance sealing. Specialized test equipment and instrumentation is utilized during this testing. This paper presents some of the techniques used in the design of cylinder head gaskets. It also depicts some of the specific tests that are conducted and test results that are required before the gaskets are released to production.