Back pressure

Back pressure refers to pressure opposed to the desired

ow of a uid in a conned place such as a pipe. It is often
caused by obstructions or tight bends in the connement
vessel along which it is moving, such as piping or air vents.

pulse of exhaust gas travels down the pipe, it encounters

a diverging conical section; this causes a wave of negative
pressure to be reected back up the pipe, which arrives
at the exhaust port towards the end of the exhaust phase,
when the cylinder pressure has fallen to a low level, and
helps to draw the remaining exhaust gas out of the cylinder. Further along the exhaust pipe, the exhaust pressure
wave encounters a converging conical section, and this reects a positive pressure wave back up the pipe. This wave
is timed to arrive at the exhaust port after scavenging is
completed, thereby plugging the exhaust port to prevent
spillage of fresh charge, and indeed may also push back
into the cylinder any charge which has already spilled.

Because it is really resistance, friction between molecules,

the term back pressure is misleading as the pressure remains and causes ow in the same direction, but the ow
is reduced due to resistance. For example, an automotive
exhaust muer with a particularly high number of twists,
bends, turns and right angles could be described as having
particularly high back pressure.[1]

Since the timing of this process is determined mainly by

exhaust system geometry, which is extremely dicult to
make variable, correct timing and therefore optimum engine eciency can typically only be achieved over a small
Back pressure caused by the exhaust system (consisting part of the engines range of operating speed.
of the exhaust manifold, catalytic converter, muer and For an extremely detailed description of these phenomena
connecting pipes) of an automotive four-stroke engine see Design and Simulation of Two-Stroke Engines (1996),
has a negative eect on engine eciency resulting in a by Prof. Gordon Blair of Queens University Belfast, pub.
decrease of power output that must be compensated by SAE International, ISBN 978-1-56091-685-7.
increasing fuel consumption.

Back pressure in automotive

(four-stroke engine) exhaust

Back pressure in two-stroke en- 3 Back pressure in information

technology
gine exhaust
The term is also used analogously in the eld of
information technology to describe the build-up of data
behind an I/O switch if the buers are full and incapable
of receiving any more data; the transmitting device halts
the sending of data packets until the buers have been
emptied and are once more capable of storing information. It also refers to an algorithm for routing data according to congestion gradients (see backpressure routing).[2][3]

In a piston-ported two-stroke engine however, the situation is more complicated due to the need to prevent unburned fuel/air mixture from passing right through the
cylinders into the exhaust. During the exhaust phase of
the cycle, back pressure is even more undesirable than in
a four-stroke engine due to the shorter time available for
exhaust and the lack of pumping action from the piston
to force the exhaust out of the cylinder. However, since
the exhaust port necessarily remains open for a time after
scavenging is completed, unburned mixture can follow
the exhaust out of the cylinder, wasting fuel and increasing pollution, and this can only be prevented if the pressure at the exhaust port is greater than that in the cylinder.

4 See also

These conicting requirements are reconciled by constructing the exhaust pipe with diverging and converging conical sections to create pressure wave reections
which travel back up the pipe and are presented at the
exhaust port. The exhaust port opens while there is still
signicant pressure in the cylinder, which drives the initial outow of exhaust. As the pressure wave from the

Engine tuning
Exhaust pulse pressure charging
Tuned pipe
1

References

[1] Muer at How Stu Works

[2] L. Tassiulas and A. Ephremides, Stability Properties of
Constrained Queueing Systems and Scheduling Policies
for Maximum Throughput in Multihop Radio Networks,
IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 37, no. 12,
pp. 1936-1948, Dec. 1992.
[3] L. Georgiadis, M. J. Neely, and L. Tassiulas, Resource
Allocation and Cross-Layer Control in Wireless Networks, Foundations and Trends in Networking, vol. 1,
no. 1, pp. 1-149, 2006.

REFERENCES

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