The Internal Combustion Engine

The engine. The heart of the car. The driving force behind the industrial revolution. Invented in France around 1859 by Etienne Lenoir, the internal combustion engine as we know it today has evolved through over 150 years of engineering and innovation. One of the first 2-cylinders produced an impressive 5 horsepower, steadily moving a horseless carriage along at a top speed of around 6 miles an hour. Today's top vehicles are a far cry from that world, with drag-racing cars putting out a thunderous 3-4000 horsepower. The same basic designs are used in container ships' diesel engines, with the record holder turning an unfathomable 108,000 horsepower and over 5 million ft-lbs of torque. It's fairly safe at this point to say the engine will remain a dominant power source for many years into the future.

What makes the engine tick, though? Regardless of what configuration a particular engine is setup in, almost all engines use the same design elements. Contained within a metal block, fuel and air are mixed in cylinders then burned to force pistons down, turning a crankshaft. Most engines use 3-4 valves, one or two letting fuel and air into the cylinder, then the others letting the burnt exhaust out to allow the cycle to begin again. An electric spark plug is used to ignite gasoline-based engines. Diesel engines, it should be noted, use glow plugs to warm the fuel when the engine is started, but once running the heat caused by compressing the fuel/air mixture is enough to cause ignition.

Among the many other components of an engine are the cooling system - a radiator cools water that moves through pathways in the engine block to keep it from overheating, just as oil is pumped through different pathways to keep all the moving parts from grinding or seizing in place. A camshaft is tied to the crankshaft, pushing rods and rocker arms to control the valves and spark plugs, and an electronic control unit controls the fuel injectors. In older engines a carburetor was used to mix fuel and air for the whole engine.

Hopefully this article hasn't been too technical for anyone, but if there are any questions then by all means comment below. There are many variants of the engine such as 4-cylinders, V6 and V8 models, and even the unique rotary engine (see Wikipedia). I appreciate my followers' sharing and commenting, and as always, have a good one!

Luke