How a Car Engine Works
jacoboneal.com
How a Car Engine Works
1–10 of 172 posts
Re: How a Car Engine Works
#2Mirror here: http://visual.ly/how-car-engine-works-animated
Re: How a Car Engine Works
#3This page is really slow on my chrome, wouldn't it be better to divide it into smaller pieces?
Re: How a Car Engine Works
#4It's worth noting that the engine illustrated is a gasoline direct injection engine, which are fairly common on new cars but historically not so.
Until the early 2000s most fuel injected gasoline engines were multi-point injection - the fuel was injected in to the incoming air stream immediately before the cylinder, and before that indirect injection which injected where the carburettor was.
Then there are carburettor engines.
Most diesel engines have been direct injection for many decades now, due to the behaviour of the fuel.
Re: How a Car Engine Works
#5How a gasoline car engine works, specifically a piston car engine with injection. There are lots of other variations on the theme of car engine. For instance, Diesel, Natural Gas, LPG, electricity (non-hybrid) and another configurations for the hot chamber, for instance a Wankel engine. Instead of injection there is carburation (an older, less efficient process for getting the fuel air mixture into the cylinders), and then there are turbo variations.
Of course gasoline, piston car engines are extremely common but the number of diesels can be very large depending on where you are (for instance, in Europe they are very common).
So for the general North-American view of what a car engine is this infographic is mostly correct but please don't take it as the be-all end-all of car engines, there is a lot more to it than that.
Re: How a Car Engine Works
#6For an old school look at internal combustion engines, check out this episode of The Secret Life of Machines:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfr3_AwuO9Y
The whole show is well worth the time.
Re: How a Car Engine Works
#7If you find this sort of thing interesting, it might be fun to mess around with designing your own engine in Automation[1]. I've always been interested in cars, but playing around in this (currently in-development) simulation/game gave me a bunch of new insight into various engine parameters.
Re: How a Car Engine Works
#8Now here's a good website with nice animated illustrations. But it's all one giant animated GIF. It won't scale up or down and it's already running short on colors. This is something where WebGL would excel, you could get the full color palette and make it interactive. So far all WebGL demos I have seen are tech demos or simple games that look like OpenGL games did in 2004, and they have not been really used inside websites, only as a separate square.
Re: How a Car Engine Works
#9Beautifully presented - and for an engine neophyte like myself extremely informative. Thanks!
Re: How a Car Engine Works
#10How a gasoline car engine works, specifically a piston car engine with injection. There are lots of other variations on the theme of car engine. For instance, Diesel, Natural Gas, LPG, electricity (non-hybrid) and another configurations for the hot chamber, for instance a Wankel engine. Instead of injection there is carburation (an older, less efficient process for getting the fuel air mixture into the cylinders), an…
Indeed. It also assumes an overhead cam configuration, and ignores the possibility of a pushrod / lifter based cam/valve system. And showing a distributor glosses over the electronic timing systems that newer cars use, whereby they don't need a traditional distributor at all, just a crankshaft position sensor.
Still, for an engine neophyte, that was a pretty decent explanation.