Sunday 27 December 2015

The Engine part 1- The Pistons

Most of us know the engine as the power house of a car. But have you ever wondered what goes inside the engine? As I was going to the market today I saw a car with smoke coming out of the front.
It set me thinking about what went wrong in the engine. As I tried to find about it, I came across how the engine worked, and what can go wrong in it. So here's what I found.
An engine is where the combustion of a fuel occurs with air in a combustion chamber that is an integral part of the working fluid flow circuit. In an internal combustion engine the expansion of the high-temperature and high-pressure gases produced by combustion apply direct force to some component of the engine. The force is applied typically to pistonsturbine blades, or a nozzle. This force moves the component over a distance, transforming chemical energy into useful mechanical energy
Now you must be wondering what a piston does or what are turbine blades etc. Even I at first was boggled by these things. However, I found that they weren't as complicated as I thought them to be.
So, here is what I found about the pistons.
The piston is the moving component(a type of a pump) that is contained by a cylinder and is made gas-tight by piston rings. In the engine it compresses the air and provides the force for the engine to produce output. Here is a simple image to explain the working. The moving thing you see is the main part of the piston and it compresses the air and through the valves ( after a process which I am later going to explain) sends energy in the form of heat to the rest of the engine.
So this is basically how a piston works. Hope it simplified the complicated things you read about pistons.

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