The Four Stroke Engine project

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Gasoline and a hundred years of development have made piston engines very much a part of our time.  Despite their outward simplistic appearance, small four stroke engines are the result of the thoughts of thousands of men and years of experience.  Consisting of dozens of parts, exactly how all these parts work does not matter to the average owner, unless he/she likes engines, likes to understand them, work on them and use them with the knowledge of what makes them work and why.  The latter definition is nearly perfect of an IET/MET student.  We like machines and we like to know about them.A flash of light, a loud shattering noise, a stench of sulfur and a piston of large proportions hurtling downward; that’s how a Frenchman first conceived the piston engine in 1678.  Gunpowder would be loaded into a cylinder and ignited.  The resulting explosion would shove a piston down, turn a crankshaft and power machinery.  The Frenchman was ahead of his time.  Gunpowder engines never turned any machinery or propelled any vehicles. There is evidence of some racers building replica engines with exploding parts, but this is said to be merely unintended coincidence.  Two years later in 1680 the Dutch physicist Christian Huygens became the first person to experiment with an internal-combustion engine.  His efforts did not produce an effective engine, but history records this work as the first experimental attempt to develop the internal-combustion engine.  One hundred and seventy-nine years later (1859) a French engineer J.J. Etienne Lenoir built a double-acting spark-ignition engine that could be operated continuously.  This started the ball rolling towards the innovation that resulted in design of present day engines.  In 1862 (3years later) another Frenchman Alphonse-Eugene Beau de Rochas patented but did not build a four stroke engine; sixteen years later (1867), when Nikolaus August Otto built a successful four stroke engine as an improvement on Lenoir’s engine, it became known as the “Otto cycle”.  Literally millions and millions of engines, unbelievable numbers of hours spent in development and still this German invention forms the basis for all four cycle gasoline engines used today.  Remarkable when considered in light of the talent applied to improve on this basic design!Piston engines come in two basic types, spark and compression ignition, with further divisions of two-stroke and four-stroke operation.  Compression ignition (diesels) engines rely on the heat generated by compressing air to start their fuel burning,  Because they trade power and lightness for fuel economy  they are seldom used in small portable power products (lawnmowers, log splitters, rototillers, etc.).  Instead these products use spark ignition engines that light their air/fuel mixture with electric current jumping across an air gap.  It is this type of engine that will be explored in this course.Four stroke engines perform each engine operation in an individual stroke of a piston; the piston descends with an intake valve open, and fresh fuel/air mixture is drawn inside.  The valve closes, the piston rises, and the mixture is compressed.  A spark jumps across the spark plug’s gap, igniting the mixture, and the piston is forced downward.  An exhaust valve opens and the piston rises, forcing the burned remnants from the cylinder.  The cycle is ready to begin again.

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