STA or Specific Time Area, (Port Time Area) is at the heart of 2-Stroke port timing design.
For what its worth and as I understand it. How to determine the STA numbers you have.
Mean open Port Area is the effective port aperture seen when the piston is positioned half way in terms of crank angle between the port starting to open and fully open.
For an Exhaust port that starts to open at 80 deg ATDC and is fully open at 180 deg ATDC. Then the mean port area will be the area of the port uncovered by the piston with the crank angle set half way between 80 and 180 ie, at 130 deg ATDC.
The rough rule of thumb is that this exposes about 70% of the port window, rod length and the bore/stroke ratio influence the actual amount.
The units for STA numbers are Time Area per Unit Displacement or “sec-cm2/cm3”
Derived by dividing the Mean-Port-Area in “cm2” by the cylinder volume in “cm3” and then multiplying it all by the time in seconds “sec” that the port is open (time of total duration).
The number of revolutions in one second = RPM/60
The total number of degrees the crank has turned in one second = (RPM/60)*360 or RPM*6
Finding the Time in seconds of the Total Port Duration. = Total Port Duration / (RPM*6)
Your STA = (Mean Port Area / Cylinder Volume) * Time of Total Port Duration
After measuring Yamaha’s TR3 GP racer and as many other good racing engines as he could using only graph paper, compass and a ruler. And doing the “(Mean Port Area / Cylinder Volume) * Time of Total Port Duration” math, Jennings came up with these numbers and called them Port-Time-Area.
Exhaust 0.00014 to 0.00015 sec-cm2/cm3
Transfer 0.00008 to 0.00010 sec-cm2/cm3
Piston Port Inlet 0.00014 to 0.00016 sec-cm2/cm3
Rotary Valve Inlet 0.00018 to 0.00019 sec-cm2/cm3
In his ground breaking reveal all book that showed the budding tuner how to modify their own cylinders to get GP like porting.
Attachment 243287
Jennings didn’t give a number for Blow Down. And for that reason, I think the importance of the “Blow-Down-Time-Area” and its affect on power output was largely over looked by the old style home tuners.
Bells book with its useful list of port timings for various engine capacities and RPM was also a blessing and a curse as it also didn’t emphasis the importance of blow down. It was great to see what the ballpark timings were, but too many tuners just used the numbers blindly.
With the result cylinders were packed up with spacer plates to get the transfer timing numbers right and the inlet and
exhaust was then ported to match their own set of essential numbers found in Bells book without much regard for blow down area.
Whether you used Jennings Port-Time-Areas or Bells numbers for the inlet, transfer and exhaust the end result was that the essential Blow Down Time Area was often overlooked and a lot of the old engines were less successful than they could have been.
Attachment 243284 Port timing by itself does not mean much, its the STA numbers that are important.
Attachment 243285 Attachment 243286 Early Honda RS125
Low and wide for the transfers is the trick to getting good Blow-Down STA numbers.
Gordon Blair after studying many 2-stroke engines and their behaviour developed a number of formulae that covered the various ports. The beauty of these formulas is that they allowed the designer to start from a target RPM and BMEP or Power-Output and use a computer to crunch the numbers.
Blair called the results of a port time area calculated by his formula based on a specific rpm and target power output, a STA or Specific Time Area for that design criteria.
Blairs STA numbers for a GP racer turning 11,500rpm and producing 26.5kW at 11 Bar
Exhaust 0.000162 sec-cm2/cm3
Blowdown 0.00113 sec-cm2/cm3
Transfer 0.0086 to 0.0185 sec-cm2/cm3
Piston Port Inlet 0.0162 sec-cm2/cm3
Blairs calculated STA results and Jennings Port-Time-Areas are both physically measured in the same way. = (Mean Port Area / Cylinder Volume) * Time of Total Port Duration. The difference is that Jennings very cleverly figured out what the Factory was up to and Blair developed a method of predicting what is required.

Originally Posted by
wobbly
Even the basic CAD type programs that use STA as a basis for getting the ports in the right place for the rpm,power needed and swept vol are hugely better than the old references.
A handy (and cheep $16 USD) Porting Calculator from:-
http://www.porting-programs.com/ it is based on Blairs and Jennings work. Use the Blair data for STA and blowdown required for a selected power output.
Kel gave me this link to Blairs very interesting book.
www.prme.nl/download/engine-1.pdf
The decade pages from p80 have link collections, links to Jenning and Bells books can be found there somewhere.
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