Internal Combustion Engine

Internal combustion engines are one of the building blocks of modern civilization. In an internal combustion engine, the combustion takes place inside a confined chamber. All internal combustion engines burn a mixture of air & fuel. The fuel can be gasoline, diesel, methane, propane etc.

The piston is the heart of an internal combustion engine..The concept of the piston engine is that a supply of air-and-fuel mixture is fed to the inside of the cylinder where it is compressed and then burnt. This internal combustion releases heat energy which is then converted into useful mechanical work as the high gas pressures generated force the piston to move along its stroke in the cylinder. It can be said, therefore, that a heat-engine is merely an energy transformer.

To enable the piston movement to be harnessed, the driving thrust on the piston is transmitted by means of a connecting-rod to a crankshaft whose function is to convert the linear piston motion in the cylinder to a rotary crankshaft movement (Fig. 1.1-1). The piston can thus be made to repeat its movement to and fro, due to the constraints of the crankshaft crankpin’s circular path and the guiding cylinder.

The backward-and-forward displacement of the piston is generally referred to as the reciprocating motion of the piston, so these power units are also known as reciprocating engines.

another defination

Animation of two-stroke engine in operation, with a tuned pipe exhaust

An automobile engine partly opened and colored to show components.

The internal combustion engine is an engine in which the combustion of a fuel (normally a fossil fuel) occurs with an oxidizer (usually air) in a combustion chamber. 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. This force is applied typically to pistons, turbine blades, or a nozzle. This force moves the component over a distance, transforming chemical energy into useful mechanical energy. The first functioning internal combustion engine was created by Étienne Lenoir.^[1]
The term internal combustion engine usually refers to an engine in which combustion is intermittent, such as the more familiar four-stroke and two-stroke piston engines, along with variants, such as the six-stroke piston engine and the Wankel rotary engine. A second class of internal combustion engines use continuous combustion: gas turbines, jet engines and most rocket engines, each of which are internal combustion engines on the same principle as previously described.^[1]
The internal combustion engine (or ICE) is quite different from external combustion engines, such as steam or Stirling engines, in which the energy is delivered to a working fluid not consisting of, mixed with, or contaminated by combustion products. Working fluids can be air, hot water, pressurized water or even liquid sodium, heated in some kind of boiler.
A large number of different designs for ICEs have been developed and built, with a variety of different strengths and weaknesses. Powered by an energy-dense fuel (which is very frequently gasoline, a liquid derived from fossil fuels). While there have been and still are many stationary applications, the real strength of internal combustion engines is in mobile applications and they dominate as a power supply for cars, aircraft, and boats.