The EA Triple Eight Engine: A Comprehensive Guide to its Design and Functionality

The EA Triple Eight is a family of engines used by Volkswagen and Audi, spanning from approximately 2008 onwards. While designs have evolved and been refined over time, the core principles remain the same. This article will delve into the intricacies of these engines, exploring their various components and features.

One of the key innovations in the EA Triple Eight engine is the use of varying length intake manifolds to optimize horsepower and torque across different RPM ranges. The intake manifold features adjustable flaps that can be lengthened or shortened depending on the load situation. This allows for a more efficient airflow and improved tumble factor, resulting in better combustion and overall performance.

The intake manifold's design is supported by a sophisticated system of sensors, solenoids, and vacuum lines. When the RPM reaches approximately 3,800, the solenoid activates, opening the intake runner and allowing the flap to adjust its length. The positioning of this runner is monitored by a sensor located at the end of the intake manifold, providing real-time feedback to the engine control module (ECM).

In contrast, Audi's version of the EA Triple Eight features a provision for E85 fuel, with a distinct intake manifold design that accommodates this type of fuel. Additionally, Audi has adopted dual injection technology on some models, where two fuel injectors are used in each cylinder head. This allows for more precise control over fuel flow and ignition timing.

The fuel injector itself is a remarkable piece of engineering, featuring six tiny ports to spray fuel into the combustion chamber. The nozzle is designed to produce a 50-degree cone angle, preventing fuel from coming into contact with the intake valves and wetting them. This ensures that the engine receives the optimal air-fuel mix, without compromising performance or reliability.

The injector's design is also noteworthy for its high-pressure capabilities. With a solenoid coil, needle valve, and Teflon sealing ring, this tiny component can withstand pressures of up to 20,000 psi (or 2,900 bar). The Teflon seal plays a crucial role in ensuring the injector's location within the cylinder head and preventing vibrations from affecting engine performance.

The operation of the fuel injector is straightforward: solenoid activation allows high-pressure fuel to flow into the nozzle, while de-energizing the solenoid closes the needle and shuts off the ports. This process is repeated continuously, with the ECM monitoring the engine's performance and adjusting the injection timing as needed.

In conclusion, the EA Triple Eight engine is a testament to Volkswagen's innovative spirit and commitment to improving vehicle performance. With its advanced fuel injector technology and adjustable intake manifold design, this engine has become an iconic symbol of modern automotive engineering. Whether you're interested in learning more about engines or simply appreciate the art of mechanical engineering, the EA Triple Eight is sure to captivate and inspire.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone and welcome to another episode of the best engines videos where i talk about award-winning engines and in this case we're talking about the ea triple eight in that volkswagen gti behind me now the ea triple eight engine family from volkswagen consists of a 1.8 liter turbo as well as a 2-liter turbocharged engine and these engines have won four ward's auto 10 best engine awards so the 2-liter turbo won in 2009 and 2010 with the audi a4 and the 1.8 liter turbo won in 2014 with the jetta as well as in 2015 with the 1.8 liter golf okay so first let's talk about the specifications of this engine then we'll talk about the engine bay as well as the airflow and then get into some of the unique and cool features about this engine so what we are looking at is a 2-liter version of the ea 888 engine it is an inline 4-cylinder which is turbocharged as well as intercooled it produces 220 horsepower at 4700 rpm and 258 pound-feet of torque at just 1500 rpm all the way to 4 500 rpm now the fact that it has peak torque at 4 500 rpm and has peak power at 4 700 rpm tells me that the torque drop off after 4 500 rpm is going to be quite steep because it reaches peak power very shortly after so this is kind of characteristic of a smaller turbo which spools up at the lower rpm range but then kind of doesn't have the airflow for the higher rpm range that this engine is capable of the engine revs all the way to 6800 rpm the engine has a compression ratio of 9.6 to 1 and features dual overhead cams with 16 valves which are chain driven cams it has hydraulic lifters and variable intake and exhaust timing as well as variable exhaust lift the engine block is made out of iron with an aluminum alloy head for fuel injection it is direct injection and can take regular or premium premium will give you a bit more power with a bore of 82.5 millimeters and a stroke of 92.8 millimeters this engine has a displacement of 1.984 liters the engine weighs about 320 pounds with cylinders one two three and four with the firing order one three four two with the manual transmission it gets 25 miles per gallon in the city 33 on the highway and with the automatic six-speed dsg it gets 24 in the city 32 on the highway looking at the engine bay here there actually is a little bit of space around it and you can see it is mounted in front of the axle so a little bit forward of the center of the front wheels they have the battery here tucked in nicely on the driver's side pushed back in the engine bay now as far as the airflow it starts here up front works its way into the air filter passes along to the back where it goes in the inlet of the turbocharger it's then rounded back to the front where it passes through an intercooler comes across it's routed back up where it goes through the throttle body and then into the intake manifold right here before it goes into the engine then coming out straight into the exhaust portion of the turbocharger and then working its way back out the exhaust so we of course need to hear the exhaust note starting it up so now let's chat about some of the cool features of this engine the first being a water cooled exhaust so the exhaust manifold is actually integrated within the cylinder head which means the coolant is heated up very quickly when you start the car by heating the engine more quickly you have better efficiency you have less wear and you can heat up the cabin sooner now because some of the energy of the exhaust is going into the coolant that does mean you have less energy for the turbocharger however because they place the turbocharger so close to the exhaust manifold it's basically right beside the cylinder head you actually get a nice response from it because there's not a lot of routing for that exhaust it just goes straight into the turbocharger and another cool benefit of integrating the exhaust manifold means that you can use leaner air fuel mixtures and the reason for this is because catalytic converters don't want to get too hot and so eventually you start using richer air fuel mixtures to cool your exhaust temps so you can keep your catalytic converter happy but if you have cooler temps because some of that exhaust energy is going into the coolant for the engine rather than the turbocharger and then to the catalytic converter by having those cooler temps you can run leaner air fuel mixtures which may be a bit hotter but overall your catalytic converter temps are still down another cool feature is the variable valve lift on the exhaust valves so there's actually four sliders on the exhaust valves which a pin drops in and it slides this slider over which forces the cam to a different profile which has more lift and can change the duration of the lift so very cool setup in order to increase exhaust flow at higher loads and higher rpm the engine also has balance shafts to reduce the vibration passing to the rest of the vehicle from the engine and they've done some clever things with these these balance shafts are actually mounted up higher in the engine block so that they're not turning around in the oil and causing the oil to foam now the ballast shafts are rotating at two times the engine rpm and that's because they're eliminating secondary forces so you've got your pistons moving up and down like this and when those pistons reach the top of the block there's an upward force so you have that negated with the balance shafts going downward and then when the pistons reach the bottom of the block there's also a secondary upward force so you have the balance shafts once again going downward to negate that vibration now volkswagen has done some cool stuff with the fuel injectors as well as some flaps in the intake manifold so i'm going to send it over to charles the humble mechanic who was volkswagen technician for quite some time and knows all about these engines and let him explain you how these work what's up everybody it's charles jason thanks for having me on dude appreciate that so the ea triple eight spans a huge number of varying engines throughout the vw and audi family starting in roughly 2008 and while the designs have been adjusted and changed and improved on some of the core stuff really does remain the same we're going to start off by talking about varying length intake manifolds in order to optimize the horsepower and torque throughout the entire rpm range the intake manifold has adjustable flaps what this does is effectively lengthen for low rpm or low load situations or shorten for higher load high rpm situations the length of the intake runner it does this with the flaps located right at the end of the intake manifold where it bolts to the cylinder head for the case of this intake manifold vacuum is supplied to this solenoid and at roughly 3 800 rpm the solenoid activates and that opens the intake runner the flap itself has this trough design in order to improve airflow when the flaps open but it also improves the tumble factor of the air going over it when the flap is closed the positioning of this runner is monitored by the sensor here on the end and then that's reported back to the ecm something a little bit different on the audi side is a provision for e85 the manifold is different and it has a cold start injector for when the vehicle is using e85 fuel and while this intake manifold we're looking at today is a little bit older of a design the theory behind why we do it and the actual execution of it is very similar on the newest generations most of the ea triple eight family engines are only direct injection meaning that our fuel injector is installed in the cylinder head and sprays fuel right into the combustion chamber there is however documentation and if we look at the intake manifold it seems like it would be a pretty straightforward add-on regarding the systems moving to dual injection in fact audi is already running dual injection on some of their vehicles as we look at the nozzle of the injector we count six tiny little ports for our fuel to be sprayed out of this fuel comes out at roughly a 50 degree cone and what that does is that prevents fuel from hitting the intake valves and wetting the valves if we were spraying the backs of the intake valves at that high pressure it would completely disrupt our fuel flow and our mix of air and fuel into the combustion chamber remember that these fuel injectors can function at a range over 200 bar and for those of you that like the psi numbers that's about 2 900 psi or if you're really trick and want to get into the kilopascals it is right at 20 000. whichever way you want to measure that that's a lot of pressure coming out of this tiny injector the injector is a pretty simple design we have a fine mesh strainer at the top then we move down to our solenoid coil our needle valve is right below that the seal down here at the bottom is actually a teflon sealing ring the main job of this teflon seal at the bottom is to prevent engine compression from leaking past the injector something that i find really cool is this little ring has two main jobs one it locates the injector properly in its port the other thing it does is acoustically seal the injector from the cylinder head so there's no reverberation that goes back and forth between the injector and the cylinder head the operation of the fuel injector it's pretty basic the solenoid is energized this moves the needle allows high pressure fuel to spray into the injector then when the solenoids de-energize the return spring inside the injector will shut that needle and close our ports all right guys there we have it a couple of cool features about the ea triple eight there's probably a ton more like variable oil pressure and controllable piston squirters but uh i'm gonna go ahead and send it on back to jason so if you enjoyed this video and there are other engines you would like to see a video on please let me know in the comments below any questions or comments of course leave those below thanks for watchinghello everyone and welcome to another episode of the best engines videos where i talk about award-winning engines and in this case we're talking about the ea triple eight in that volkswagen gti behind me now the ea triple eight engine family from volkswagen consists of a 1.8 liter turbo as well as a 2-liter turbocharged engine and these engines have won four ward's auto 10 best engine awards so the 2-liter turbo won in 2009 and 2010 with the audi a4 and the 1.8 liter turbo won in 2014 with the jetta as well as in 2015 with the 1.8 liter golf okay so first let's talk about the specifications of this engine then we'll talk about the engine bay as well as the airflow and then get into some of the unique and cool features about this engine so what we are looking at is a 2-liter version of the ea 888 engine it is an inline 4-cylinder which is turbocharged as well as intercooled it produces 220 horsepower at 4700 rpm and 258 pound-feet of torque at just 1500 rpm all the way to 4 500 rpm now the fact that it has peak torque at 4 500 rpm and has peak power at 4 700 rpm tells me that the torque drop off after 4 500 rpm is going to be quite steep because it reaches peak power very shortly after so this is kind of characteristic of a smaller turbo which spools up at the lower rpm range but then kind of doesn't have the airflow for the higher rpm range that this engine is capable of the engine revs all the way to 6800 rpm the engine has a compression ratio of 9.6 to 1 and features dual overhead cams with 16 valves which are chain driven cams it has hydraulic lifters and variable intake and exhaust timing as well as variable exhaust lift the engine block is made out of iron with an aluminum alloy head for fuel injection it is direct injection and can take regular or premium premium will give you a bit more power with a bore of 82.5 millimeters and a stroke of 92.8 millimeters this engine has a displacement of 1.984 liters the engine weighs about 320 pounds with cylinders one two three and four with the firing order one three four two with the manual transmission it gets 25 miles per gallon in the city 33 on the highway and with the automatic six-speed dsg it gets 24 in the city 32 on the highway looking at the engine bay here there actually is a little bit of space around it and you can see it is mounted in front of the axle so a little bit forward of the center of the front wheels they have the battery here tucked in nicely on the driver's side pushed back in the engine bay now as far as the airflow it starts here up front works its way into the air filter passes along to the back where it goes in the inlet of the turbocharger it's then rounded back to the front where it passes through an intercooler comes across it's routed back up where it goes through the throttle body and then into the intake manifold right here before it goes into the engine then coming out straight into the exhaust portion of the turbocharger and then working its way back out the exhaust so we of course need to hear the exhaust note starting it up so now let's chat about some of the cool features of this engine the first being a water cooled exhaust so the exhaust manifold is actually integrated within the cylinder head which means the coolant is heated up very quickly when you start the car by heating the engine more quickly you have better efficiency you have less wear and you can heat up the cabin sooner now because some of the energy of the exhaust is going into the coolant that does mean you have less energy for the turbocharger however because they place the turbocharger so close to the exhaust manifold it's basically right beside the cylinder head you actually get a nice response from it because there's not a lot of routing for that exhaust it just goes straight into the turbocharger and another cool benefit of integrating the exhaust manifold means that you can use leaner air fuel mixtures and the reason for this is because catalytic converters don't want to get too hot and so eventually you start using richer air fuel mixtures to cool your exhaust temps so you can keep your catalytic converter happy but if you have cooler temps because some of that exhaust energy is going into the coolant for the engine rather than the turbocharger and then to the catalytic converter by having those cooler temps you can run leaner air fuel mixtures which may be a bit hotter but overall your catalytic converter temps are still down another cool feature is the variable valve lift on the exhaust valves so there's actually four sliders on the exhaust valves which a pin drops in and it slides this slider over which forces the cam to a different profile which has more lift and can change the duration of the lift so very cool setup in order to increase exhaust flow at higher loads and higher rpm the engine also has balance shafts to reduce the vibration passing to the rest of the vehicle from the engine and they've done some clever things with these these balance shafts are actually mounted up higher in the engine block so that they're not turning around in the oil and causing the oil to foam now the ballast shafts are rotating at two times the engine rpm and that's because they're eliminating secondary forces so you've got your pistons moving up and down like this and when those pistons reach the top of the block there's an upward force so you have that negated with the balance shafts going downward and then when the pistons reach the bottom of the block there's also a secondary upward force so you have the balance shafts once again going downward to negate that vibration now volkswagen has done some cool stuff with the fuel injectors as well as some flaps in the intake manifold so i'm going to send it over to charles the humble mechanic who was volkswagen technician for quite some time and knows all about these engines and let him explain you how these work what's up everybody it's charles jason thanks for having me on dude appreciate that so the ea triple eight spans a huge number of varying engines throughout the vw and audi family starting in roughly 2008 and while the designs have been adjusted and changed and improved on some of the core stuff really does remain the same we're going to start off by talking about varying length intake manifolds in order to optimize the horsepower and torque throughout the entire rpm range the intake manifold has adjustable flaps what this does is effectively lengthen for low rpm or low load situations or shorten for higher load high rpm situations the length of the intake runner it does this with the flaps located right at the end of the intake manifold where it bolts to the cylinder head for the case of this intake manifold vacuum is supplied to this solenoid and at roughly 3 800 rpm the solenoid activates and that opens the intake runner the flap itself has this trough design in order to improve airflow when the flaps open but it also improves the tumble factor of the air going over it when the flap is closed the positioning of this runner is monitored by the sensor here on the end and then that's reported back to the ecm something a little bit different on the audi side is a provision for e85 the manifold is different and it has a cold start injector for when the vehicle is using e85 fuel and while this intake manifold we're looking at today is a little bit older of a design the theory behind why we do it and the actual execution of it is very similar on the newest generations most of the ea triple eight family engines are only direct injection meaning that our fuel injector is installed in the cylinder head and sprays fuel right into the combustion chamber there is however documentation and if we look at the intake manifold it seems like it would be a pretty straightforward add-on regarding the systems moving to dual injection in fact audi is already running dual injection on some of their vehicles as we look at the nozzle of the injector we count six tiny little ports for our fuel to be sprayed out of this fuel comes out at roughly a 50 degree cone and what that does is that prevents fuel from hitting the intake valves and wetting the valves if we were spraying the backs of the intake valves at that high pressure it would completely disrupt our fuel flow and our mix of air and fuel into the combustion chamber remember that these fuel injectors can function at a range over 200 bar and for those of you that like the psi numbers that's about 2 900 psi or if you're really trick and want to get into the kilopascals it is right at 20 000. whichever way you want to measure that that's a lot of pressure coming out of this tiny injector the injector is a pretty simple design we have a fine mesh strainer at the top then we move down to our solenoid coil our needle valve is right below that the seal down here at the bottom is actually a teflon sealing ring the main job of this teflon seal at the bottom is to prevent engine compression from leaking past the injector something that i find really cool is this little ring has two main jobs one it locates the injector properly in its port the other thing it does is acoustically seal the injector from the cylinder head so there's no reverberation that goes back and forth between the injector and the cylinder head the operation of the fuel injector it's pretty basic the solenoid is energized this moves the needle allows high pressure fuel to spray into the injector then when the solenoids de-energize the return spring inside the injector will shut that needle and close our ports all right guys there we have it a couple of cool features about the ea triple eight there's probably a ton more like variable oil pressure and controllable piston squirters but uh i'm gonna go ahead and send it on back to jason so if you enjoyed this video and there are other engines you would like to see a video on please let me know in the comments below any questions or comments of course leave those below thanks for watching\n"