| How 4-stroke Engine Works |
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| Written by Turnmission Team |
| Sunday, 19 July 2009 23:15 |
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First of all, I am quite sure that most of you know what is an engine right? And it does mean the engine in a car. Anyhow, an engine is a block of metals that powered the cars. To be more simple and general, the engine is the heart of the car where most people name it. It is located mostly at the front compartment of a car depending on its manufacturer and models. However, there is engine that is located at the back and even middle of a car!! This will be explained in the Drivetrain part. All you need to know when people ask you is that mostly on-road cars now are using the reciprocating internal combustion engine, which is using petrol mostly. They are cleaner and wider in production. So, to understand how it works basically, refer to the graphic below. It has four strokes, and that's why it is called the 4-stroke engine. They are the:
The piston starts at the top, the intake valves opens (the blue colored stick-look-alike thing), and the piston (the boxy with arrow thing) moves down to let the engine take in a cylinder-full of air and gasoline. Only the tiniest drop of gasoline needs to be mixed into the air for this to work. Compression Stroke Then the piston moves back up to compress this air/fuel mixture. Notice that, at this time the intake valves is closed (when the valves is closed and the piston is moving up, the air/fuel has no way to escape, thus compression occur). Compression makes the explosion more powerful and the air/fuel is ready to explode. Combustion Stroke When the piston reaches the top of its stroke, the spark plugs emits a spark to ignite the gasoline. The gasoline charge in the cylinder explodes when meeting the sparks created by the spark plug, forcing the piston down thus creating power. This power is transferred to a rotating power through the crankshaft. At this time, the valves are still closed. For easy understanding, imagine you light up a firecracker inside a cup facing the cup upside down. What will happens? This process is exactly the same idea. Exhaust Stroke Once the piston hits the bottom of its stroke, the exhaust valve (the blue colored stick-look-alike thing) opens and the exhaust gas leaves the cylinder to go out the car's exhaust pipe. Mind that the exhaust gas was created after the ignition of the air/fuel mixture.After this, the engine will be back to the first stroke and keep on repeating if the engine is still running. Do you know that different cars have different configurations and different smoothness, manufacturing cost and shape characteristics of engine that make them more suitable in certain vehicles? The engine demo above is just a basic how it works and did not symbolize any engine make. |