INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE

By George Konstantakopoulos December 28, 2009 Fall 2009

This assignment has a purpose of choosing a technology and analyzing the system as a whole. To achieve this we should refer to history since the earliest days until now. Foremost among these is the reference to the present situation and future developments of this technology. Other aspects that should be considered is the way in which investors managed the new technology, who lost and who gained from this new technology, the major changes made by the researchers to evolve as well as the complexity of the system itself . The technology that will be analyzed is the internal combustion engine. This engine is based on principles of thermodynamics and the conversion of thermal energy into kinetic energy. The definition of an internal combustion engine is: one in which combustion of the fuel takes place in a confined space, producing expanding gases that are used directly to provide mechanical power. Such engines are classified as reciprocating or rotary, spark ignition or compression ignition, and two-stroke or four-stroke; the most familiar combination, used from automobiles to lawn mowers, is the reciprocating, spark-ignited, four-stroke gasoline engine.i We will analyze the most widespread and commercialized form of this technology until today, namely that is the reciprocating, spark-ignited, fourstroke gasoline engine, and we will just explain the way it works for the other type engines. To accomplish the purpose and understand the entire system which eventually led to the development of the internal combustion engine we have to go back in time. The predecessor and those which showed the way for the creation of the internal combustion engine is a gunpowder engine. Two different scientists made experiments with such an engine in 1680 to 1690, Huygens and Papin. This kind of mixture delivered several problems for the further developing. The most important problem was the price of gunpowder that was prohibitive for wide use at this time. Another major mistake for both scientists was that they ignored the laws of thermodynamics, which are used in cannons, but instead tried to operate the machine with the gases that have been caused by the explosion of gunpowder, so most of the energy generated was lost. After this failure Papin kept on repeating the experiments with different way of using steam as a medium for the movement of the piston. Many scientists followed this technique which does not contain internal combustion in the area of the piston so we will not deal with them even if it is similar to internal combustion engines. The only point which will be mentioned is the engine of James Watt and Matthew Boulton who turned a simple pump to a machine that produced rotary movement, and thereby may transmit movement in any kind of machine. A new age was starting for many different industrial innovation based on this modificationii. At the end of the 18th century and till the mid of 19th a small number of inventors tried to complete a working gas-engine but none of them succeed to complete all the requirements either from lack of perfection or for financial reasons. One of them was Barnett that made a tremendous effort and his developed engine was flawless in operation for this time, but he did not have the resources to promote it, so his engine stayed in the workshop. Barnett introduced fundamentals improvements such as the compression of the
i

Rae, John B. American Automobile Manufacturers: The First Forty Years. 1st ed. Philadelphia: Chilton, 1959. Questia. Web. 19 Jan. 2010. ii Bryan H. Bunch, Alexander Hellemans, (2004), The history of science and technology: a browser's guide to the great discoveries, inventions, and the people who made them, from the dawn of time to today, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

mixture before the combustion and the lighting of the mixture under pressure. These principles are similar, if not the same, and are still used at this type of engines. Every one of these scientists, each one in his own field, contributed to perfecting the gas-engine, but Jean Lenoir that produced his engine in 1859 to 1866 was the one that made it. Lenoirs engine was a non-compression gas-engine. The main flaw of this idea was the combustion material selected. The engine had an electrical ignition system but didnt always work. It consumed a big amount of expensive gas. Furthermore it needed enormous amounts of cooling water because it was over-heated, something that ruined the bearings and as a result it seized. At the same time Beau de Rochas in 1862 patents the four-stroke engine but never builds it. The engine stays on the drawings. The road was open for even more scientists and technician to evolve at the development of the internal combustion engine. The most famous of all, Nikolaus Otto, born on June 14, 1832 in Holzahausen, Germany and died on January 26, 1891 in Cologne, concluded an analysis of the Lenoir version that it was unprofitable and that would be much more efficient if operated using liquid fuel. Otto in collaboration with Ugen Langen created the first company in the world to manufacture engines in 1864-1865 that was named N.A. Otto & Cie. Some years after Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach joined the company that it still exists until today. Langen and Otto developed a two-stroke engine for which won the gold medal at the Paris World Exhibition, for the development of the most economical power for small businesses. Some years later in 1877 Nikolaus Otto develops the Lenoir engine as he had thought earlier, resulting in a machine almost commensurate with the current, the four-cycle or also known the Otto-cycle engine. The first stroke creates a mixture of air and fuel, which in the second stroke is compressed and explodes through the ignition system. The piston pushed downwards by the explosion passes the kinetic energy. The fourth stroke exhausts the gases that occurred during the explosion and empties the cylinder as the piston moves upwards to begin a new cycle. It is worth noting however that his patent was invalidated because of de Rochas patent at an earlier time, although it stayed in the laboratory but had already described a four stroke machine. Otto didnt know about the existing patent and until his death tried to patent his own engineiii iv. Other internal combustion engines are the diesel engine and the Wankel engine. From the beginning of this technology, the main feature that has stimulated the development was the force in relation to the volume occupied. This gave the opportunities and the ability to build vehicles with two, three and four wheels. The automobile industry was born, and over the next 100 years would make a leap in economic terms. Also there are many influences on the society. At the beginning only the rich could get, then the cost of production started to fall as production lines grew. Thus the final product came at a lower price and allowed the lower social classes to obtain. Your car shows your social class. Every one family owns a car. Exotic models are still in the production. The basic idea of transportation has been forgotten for most owners. The size, the color, the power, the trademark is the most important now. Even the thousands of models produced with many different variations of the internal combustion engine, from the Otto engine and so far there has been no change in the fundamentals principles of internal combustion engines. The
iii

Howard B. Rockman, 2004, Intellectual property law for engineers and scientists, Wiley-IEEE [Accessed: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 19:03:57] iv M. G. Lay, James E. Vance, Ways of the World: A History of the World's Roads and of the Vehicles That Used Them, Rutgers University Press, 1992

basic idea of the development is the efficiency and the reliability that is mainly gained from the materials and the design of the parts that consists an engine. Changes and improvements have been made only in respect of the regional engine parts such as the replacement of carburetor with direct injection, more adequate cooling and ignition systems, transmission from the engine into regional equipment as air conditioning and hydraulic steering. Microelectronics through their wide spread are influencing the control of the internal combustion engine as they interfere between the driver and the engine. After all these years of evolution we have reached the limits on engine performance versus weight and size. We should mention the research and development that has been done in the field of fuels, helping to achieve the odds. Now, after so many years of use, we have realized that although there are many positive, the vast mass production of this technology brought us in front of some very important issues for the entire human kind, pollution and global warming. Both issues are directly affected by this technology. Car companies are trying to create engines with less consumption and less emission of gaseous. Although technologies that do not cause pollution have been developed to a point that can be effective, oil companies do not allow the replacement of polluting internal combustion engines with other types of green engines and push the car industry to switch between the technologies with the larger delay possible. The most common technology is the one developed to work with the gasoline and called hybrid. Many car companies have developed such cars. Other types of green technology are electric, ethanol, hydrogen, natural gas, plug-in hybrids, biodiesel and air powered cars. We have to take drastic measures to avoid worst situation. We have produced a technology which in principle gave joy to the world by joining him, and now affects our planet.