In the 1950's, the car industry switched from flatheads to overhead valves, which could withstand operation at 5000RPM. An engine of this design could produce about a maximum of about 150HP out of 5 liters while running at 2500RPM. In the 1940's, most Otto cycle engines for passenger cars used an engine design called a flathead, which had a simple and cheap valve drive system but which had an upper speed limit of about 3800RPM. I will close here with a simplified bit of engine design history to illustrate these points. The overall design trend, then, as the cost of fuel increases with time, is toward smaller-displacement engines that spin faster. You get a light engine by minimizing its size, which means minimizing its displacement and maximizing its allowable rotating speed. This in turn requires the engine designer to furnish some way of getting the valves that conduct fuel/air mix into the cylinders and exhaust gas out of the cylinders to open and close faster, to keep pace with the crankshaft's rotating speed.Ī lighter engine means a lighter car, which means less wasted energy hauling its mass around- and therefore greater fuel efficiency in terms of kilometers per liter of fuel.
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So why would two engines with the same displacement produce different amounts of power? The answer is that power = torque x RPM and the easiest way to extract more power from a given amount of engine displacement is by forcing the engine to turn faster. Since piston stroke x diameter x number of pistons equals volume, engine power is usually estimated by knowing the engine's volume displacement in liters.
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The diameter, stroke, and number of the pistons in the engine determine how much fuel and air mix it gulps down and burns per revolution of the crankshaft, which means larger stroke, bigger pistons, or more of them all mean more power produced per turn of the crankshaft. This is true almost independent of the size of the engine and the details of its internal workings. The best attainable efficiency of an Otto cycle in current practice is typically about 34% the rest of the energy released by the combustion process is irretrievably lost as waste heat. The details of the Otto cycle determine the maximum amount of useful work an engine running on that cycle is capable of extracting from the fuel/air input. This process is called a thermodynamic cycle and the cycle used in gasoline engines is called the Otto cycle. Gasoline engines produce an amount of power which is proportional to the mass flow rate of fuel and air through the engine the chemical energy of this mixture is converted to heat energy by burning and then to kinetic energy by having the hot mixture push down on the pistons in the engine, which urge the output shaft to turn.
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These results are then graphed as a curve on a chart with RPM on the X axis and power on the Y axis.
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Measurements are taken at all RPM's in the engine's operating range with the engine running at full throttle at each setting. With both torque and RPM now known, the power output is calculated. An RPM gauge connected to the wheel furnishes the rotating speed. That force is multiplied by the perpendicular distance between the center of the output shaft and the point of application of the braking force, which equals the torque output. A force gauge measures how hard the rotating wheel is pulling on the brake assembly. The dynamometer applies a friction force with a brake assembly to a wheel connected to the output shaft of the engine. The test setup commonly used to do this is called a dynamometer.
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This means that to measure the shaft power output of any engine, you must measure the torque it is producing and multiply that by the RPM at which it is operating. First off, hold this in mind at all times: Power is the product of torque times RPM.