Does anyone use swivel pickups to prevent oil starvation in sports car racing?
Short of going full-on dry sump, the popular method to avoid oil starvation in a road course racing sports car seems to be baffles in the oil sump with "trap door" hinges. These systems are good at keeping oil from sloshing out of the baffle "bucket" in the middle of the sump, but oil is obviously only going to slosh in to that area when the acceleration being experienced is sending it in the correct direction (so for example when cornering, any oil that's towards the inside of the turn relative to the baffled area can slosh in, but any oil on the other side is going to stay there, away from the pickup).
Because of this, even with a really good oil baffle system, a long enough sustained turn will eventually result in most of the oil collecting on the outside-of-the-turn side of the pan, outside of the baffled area with the pickup.
Another solution to this problem is "flop tubes" or "swivel tubes", where the pickup actually swings back and forth (or rather side-to-side for a sports car mostly). However I can only find very few references to swivel tubes being used in sports cars for road coarse racing. Is this a thing? If not why not?
Some possible downsides I can think of are the increased risk of the pickup tube breaking off due to the swivel (which would be catastrophic) or the swivel getting stuck on one side (resulting in very poor pickup performance during turns of just one direction). I guess if a baffle trap door hinge breaks or gets stuck things are not quite so bad? And there is some redundancy there? Or are there some other reasons.
Note: I am aware of things like accusumps (which also wont last forever in a sustained turn) and dual/multiple pickups (which seem to require a special/dual pump?). There isn't a particular application that I'm asking about this for, but rather I'm just curious to know in general why I don't see much use of swivel tubes.
Posted Jan 4, 2023, 6:17 PM UTC