Lotus Elan and Lotus Elan Plus 2 Forums

Quite a lot has been said on high pressure, high capacity, standard oil pumps!
So, I thought I would post a picture inside a variable displacement, variable pressure pump, oil goes in on the left and out on the right. You can see the channel on the top fed from a control solenoid valve, the control valve pressure pushes against the spring pressure and changes the pump volume keeping the desired pressure without wasting energy recirculating excess oil. Under high load the oil pressure can be ramped up as required.

Does this have anything to do with lotus elan engines? Any engines at all? Certainly a very fancy pump

This is modern technology. Thanks for posting something interesting. The very early Anglia and Cortina pumps were all vane type pumps although they looked very similar externally to the later and far more common rotor type pump that we all know well (not sure why the design was changed). I wonder what the advantages / disadvantages are rotor versus vane? Obviously vane works best for something that’s variable displacement. I also wonder what parameters the engineers used to determine the optimum displacement and pressure for any given engine operating condition?
What type of car is this one out of as a matter of interest?

The pump is from a 2020 1.5L 3 cylinder turbo diesel. It had an issue with oil pressure not changing as requested by the control module. When I removed the control valve from the pump it’s gauze filter was covered with metallic particles, I took the pump apart expecting to find it had broken in some way but it had not, further investigation revealed that the crankshaft thrust bearings had failed! 12k miles!

Interesting - why did the thrust washers fail? Could only be an assembly or material fault at that mileage on a new engine.

That I don’t know, I’ll be fitting a new engine and, although it interests me to find out I won’t get paid for tearing it down to look unfortunately. Might get the apprentice on it though! Trouble is the manufacturers might want to investigate to see what they did wrong, don’t want to send a pile of bits back!