Enginering contains word engine as in steam engines the first reciprocating piston engines that fueled with coal dust or external combustion steam fueled railroads & the first & second industrial revolutions before crude oil based gasoline & diesel fuels made from petroleum deep borehole pressure extraction mined from Earth's crust, the easy oil party ended in the middle of the 20th century, yet fossil fuels today represent about 98% of all transportation energy primary inputs. We are running on ancient sunlight people, plants that died millions of years ago, buried deep under heat & pressure closer to Earth's hot core, these plant biomolecules broke down into hydrocarbon chains, liquids, gases and solids like tar. Known as black gold, oil has created more wealth than any other thing in human history. With petrochemical agriculture, known as the Green Revolution, we enable human population to go from 2 billion people to almost 8 billion people at the same time today.
Watch this https://youtu.be/EFfyWbi3APk?si=5J1nVRqR55I8dlhs
Piston engines will remain as prime energy movers in vehicles of all kinds for hundreds of years because we already know how to convert coal and natural gas to gasoline, otherwise called synthetic fuels, biomass, renewable feedstock, waste oil, old tires, coal, natural gas, wood, dump gas recovery, trash waste gas recovery and compost gas recovery, there will continue to be ways to economically make feasible engine lubricating oils, gasoline & diesel fuel for at least 300 more years, mostly as synfuels or short for synthetic fuels. Add in biofuels 4th && 5th generation and cellulosic ethanol, and methanol to gasoline, and you have 500 more years of biofuels as drop-in replacements for unleaded gasoline or on road diesel.
During the next 200-years nuclear fission and fusion energy technology, including classified quantum energy technology will enable the 6th Industrial Revolution to transition all of societies energy to nuclear electric with more than 15 billion years' worth of radioactive fertile and fissile elements in the crust & oceans, we will never run out of new nuclear fuel rod making minerals. The Sun become a Red Giant and boil the oceans off of Earth before we run out of easily mined uranium or thorium taken from Earth's crust or the world's oceans by aqueous chemical polymer bead extraction. Even the ocean water can be converted to hydrogen gas & oxygen to enable more rocket fuels & even cleaner space launches.
10,000 Gs of acceleration, 1000 C temperature, 300 Bar or 4000+PSI of pressure, F1 engine achieve thermal efficiency greater than 50% with piston rings that are a technological material science miracle of applied knowledge.
Refined over more than 100 years of innovation across 4 major industrial revolutions, engines are not going anywhere, in thanks because of Toyota & Subaru who eschewed the battery electric hype in favor of better engines and hybrid synergy drive technology or hybrid & plug-in Prime Toyota Lexus vehicles. Big daddy of Automotive Toyota has been moping the floor of the global automotive landscape for more than 60 years, showing all the other automakers how it's done in superlative engines like the 2JZ inline 6 or vehicles like the Lexus LFA! Tens of millions of Toyota's Corollas (Little Crown) sold over 12 generations since the 1970's or the preeminent off-road all-weather OG SUV beast Toyota Landcruiser's since the 1970's. Prius Hybrid superstar for more than 20 years with 15 million sold worldwide! I believe that Toyota is keeping the Economy of Japan on life support and the most valuable company in Japan, along with Sony & Honda.
During the Steam Engine era, pistons were made of hardwood & sealed with leather rings or rings made of tar infused rope (note no plastics or polymers were commercially viable, other than latex early on, from latex trees, mostly made in fiber latex belts and tires for bicycles and cars. By the late 1800's it was cast iron pistons with cast iron piston rings for sealing.
Engines convert hot expanding gas into rotational energy!
That means gasoline burned in air creates hot expanding gas to shove the piston down
The pistons connecting rod translates the force of the hot gas shoved piston to the cranking of a shaft
The crankshaft kind of like the Pedal on Bicycle, while the fossil fueled piston is like the legs of the bicycle ride, that is both impacts down thrust on the pedals or pistons to spin the crank in order to turn the wheels and propel the vehicle forward with torque or power.
Engines suck in fuel & air, or a turbo or super charger compresses such into the intake, then the open intake valve closes by spring pressure & camshaft control. Now inside the cylinder a mixture of fuel & air compresses as the piston moves upward decreasing the volume inside the cylinder, which pressurized the fuel air mixture. Just after top dead center where the piston reaches the high point of compression and position, a spark plug emits a hot arch of electricity to ignite the fuel air mixture which undergoes a deflagration pressure and head generating chemical reaction to make water vapor & CO2 mostly, which combined shove the piston down imparting mechanical energy into the wrist pin & connecting rod onto the crankshaft which combines the piston power of many pistons to produce continual torque pulse output into the transmission or power split device, to shafts connected to the vehicles propulsion wheels, that is that the metal wheel covered in rubber tire translate the engine chemical energy from the fuel into forward motion that pulls or shoves the tire across road surfaces depending on drive configuration. A read drive shoves the tires across the road, while front wheel drive pulls the tires across the road, both are kinds of traction, which is why soft compliant fiber & steel wire reinforced rubber tires from the interface for concrete, asphalt or gravel or dirt roads. Vehicles, roads and tires have improved much since the 1960's. Much cleaner in terms of emissions today, the on-road passenger vehicle, car or SUV, has advanced emissions controls that cut tailpipe smog emitted by 95%.
Suck, Squeeze, Bang, Blow
Suck in fuel air, squeeze to compress it, bang it with spark, extract useful work, blow exhaust gas out, reset/ loop function. The Engine Control Unit or ECU takes many kinds of sensor data to precisely control the pulse width injection of fuel through the electronically controlled fuel injectors with MAF sensor intake & crank position and knock sensor in block, it mixes signals with DAC ADC mixed signal control, especially the fuzzy logic of the automatic transmission, analog circuits. Most ECU are computer, digital, with hard drive SSF storage and passive heatsink cooling. New 2025 automobiles have more than 150 chips, as in integrated circuits like the SOC in your smartphone. A full self-driving car also a rolling uploading big data center with lots of high-powered compute onboard. I just put a computer in my car's glove compartment, but I can hold the internet in my hand in iPhone or Android Samsung models over 4G LTE or 5G NR mobile broadband now. Can you say Apple Maps, Google Maps, Hey Google, Hey Siri, Hey Computer or Alexa. It's voice control now. Can you imagine when the cars become spiritual or self-aware? I am not even sure that such is possible, but the age of spiritual machines means that we use the math of our brain, DNA and Epigenetics to design machines that exhibit the same exquisite detail in form and function.
Early coal gas fueled, or coal dust fueled internal combustion atmospheric free piston and captured double action piston engines were only about 10% thermal efficiency, but the 4 Stroke Otto cycle compressed the air & fuel before spark ignition, raising thermal or fuel efficiency to 30%, 300% better than atmospheric engines. 300% better is an enormous and amazing improvement, or radical innovation. Imagine if we magically increased your income by 300%. With a compression ratio of 3.5 to 1, these low compression early engines also were fueled by low octane variable quality gasoline.
Out of Round piston rings become round when compressed as the piston inserted into the cylinder, and innovation from late 1860 that radically improved piston sealing internal combustion engines. Stacks of 3 or 4 or 5 or 7 rings help to keep the oil in the bottom of the engine, lubricating the crank bearings and piston rings and con rod bearings, while the hot gasoline air combustion gasses kept above the piston to extract useful work to spin the vehicles wheels for propulsion.
By 1880s splash oiling systems and compression rations of 6.5:1 meant commercial on road vehicle engines quickly adapted in an era when battery electric vehicles sold well. People at the time thought about horse drawn carriages, and when Henry Ford asked his customers what they wanted they said "better horses" when he wanted to sell the Model T. I know I jumped a few decades there, this is blogging not the encyclopedia.
In modern engines for 2025 onward model years, engines piston rings have to exhibit a carefully designed balance of contract pressure, ring height, area, tangential pressure, balancing sealing of combustion against fiction forces from the rings scraping the oil film on the cylinder wall. This desire to minimize friction in the engine to reduce tailpipe emissions and improve fuel economy, but if the ring is not tight or snug enough then blow by would cause oil dilution that has plagued the 1.5 L Earth dreams turbo engine of Honda for example. That means combustion gases squeak by the rings into the engine oil, along with some gasoline and vapors thereof, that foul or dilute the oil with contamination faster. Such engines are prone to early loss of compression and require more oil changes with special additive engine oil to seal the rings properly.
I think it would be ethical or moral for Honda to recall and repair such engines with appropriate solutions that result in longer engine life and long oil life between oil changes. Piston Ring Contact Pressure means the force that is exerted on the interface between the outer edge face of the piston ring and the inner wall surfaces of the cylinder coated in a thin film of oil by the pistons lower oil control ring. It's a careful engineering balancing act to design good piston ring sealing while also reducing friction, requiring extensive R&D and working well with the Toyota problem solving manufacturing ways. Radial Pressure Distribution means the force the piston ring exerts outwardly against the cylinder walls. Piston rings rectangular contact area also transfers more than half of the combustion heat into the cylinder wall, so that the water-cooling jacket filled with engine coolant can transfer heat away from the aluminum alloy block to the aluminum fan assisted front radiator to dump waste heat out of the engine and into the world.
Low pressure oil control rings help to keep the engine oil out of the hot gas combustion at the top, known as the lubricating bottom end of the engine, the oil control rings sit at the bottom of the piston and gently scrape oil back into the crankcase. Ring twisting in the 1920 offered yet more improvement to the balance between sealing hot gas above and oil bellow the piston. Keystone wedge rings with trapezoidal shape and different angles enabled a reduction in carbon deposits of turbo-diesel engines in heavy duty Class 8 on road truck engines, which prevented ring sticking in the compression rings of such engines.
Oil control rings helped to reduce oil consumption and cleaned up exhaust emission in early carburetor automotive engines by the 1930's and onward. 3-part oil control rings developed for aircraft engines in WWII made their way into automotive engines, made of graphite cast iron, then nodule cast iron, offering bear wear resistance and thermal conductivity. Annealed or heated to increase ductility, the modulus of elasticity increases making the rings longer lasting or more durable. Quench rapid cooling chrome steel to make rings enabled increasing of the microstructure strength in high performance engines. To enhance ring life the ring steel often nitride coated, as in dipped in a hot chemical bath to impart a wear resistant nitride coating which literally imparts nitrogen atoms into the steel that radically improve its wear resistance. Spring steel center control rings in 3 ring systems are also able to maintain their spring pressure at higher temperatures. Hard chrome coating piston ring materials made them last 3X longer still. Molybdenum coating rings in the 1960's flame or plasma sprayed. Physical or vapor deposition phosphate or copper coated rings emerged in the 2000's as on road vehicle development & tighter emissions control laws favored engine friction reduction technology.
Once more, I will say it again, engines will become vehicle mounted electricity generators, yes, I know they already are with the alternator & battery, but I mean operating at one specific most efficient RPM speed, as in peak thermal efficiency with lowest possible emissions. In other words, in range extended electric vehicles the engine acts as an onboard primary energy input generator converting gasoline into kWh or electricity to use in the axial flux propulsion motor drive system of the REEV or PHEV or as range extenders, like I3 REX model from BMW or that Prime RAV4 from Toyota. The Automotive Range Extender Engine Generator reminds me of an aircraft APU or auxiliary power supply turbine generator unit, that makes 400hz electricity on passenger aircraft like the Boeing 777 or Airbus A321 Neo as examples, or my personal favorite the Boeing 878 Dreamliner :)
I dream of blended wing aircraft carrying hundreds of passengers worldwide while using 70% less fuel and releasing 90% less noise near airports during takeoff when the engines are loudest. The inboard blended wing ducted fan high bypass engines of NASA designs that Airbus & Boeing can easily commercialize blend atmospheric air with hot turbine exhaust to minimize heat signature and noise emissions of such amazing novel aircraft designs, like that of the B2 Spirit Stealth Bomber, or blended wing passenger aircraft flying international routes between countries where the superior fuel economy translates not only to ultra-low emissions of heat, smog & sound, but also radically enhance flight endurance or range per unit of fuel or fuel economy in automotive terms.
With a titanium alloy expander and silicon carbide coated top & bottom ring in 3 ring piston rings of current F1 engines, the pinnacle of engineering technology applied to make superlative piston rings. Only 1 compression ring and 1 oil control ring, the 5-axis slow precise machined low mass F1 engine pistons are shape mass optimized so the engine can hit 15,000 RPM. These engines are so tight cold they have to heat them to 154 F in order to use the external starter motor to get the F1 engine started.
In 2022 onward road vehicles 0W-16 fully synthetic motor oil designed to work in concert with extensive friction reduction between the piston rings and cylinder wall while still maintaining good hot combustion gas sealing and oil scraping functions needed to ensure good engine life and longer intervals between oil changes. Such is the case with the 2ZR-FXE engine of our 2022 Corolla Hybrid. I has a spin on oil filter thank the Lord our God, vs that goofy VW inspired plastic filter cartridge noise of Meg's 2010 Prius III, that wastes more paper towels and gloves and not eco-friendly the way they claim. I take the old engine oil and filter to the local Autoparts store for recycling.
Lower quality automakers consider 1 quart of oil consumption every 1000 miles or 1 liter of oil consumption every 1600 km, normal. I am telling you and want you to comprehend that Toyota makes engines with superior thermal economy and radically less oil consumption using higher precision manufacturing of the engine parts and better QA: QC during assembly of the engine or the TMS Toyota Manufacturing System, producing cars of superior durability or long-life operation with basic maintenance. Long lasting high quality durable cars & SUV like Prius, Camry, Corolla, Tacoma, Tundra, Landcruiser, Toyota mops the floor of the automotive industry as the clear leader of superlative high-quality vehicle with legendary reliability, though a few examples of blunders in models that had bad engines or bad frames that rust out easily or carpets that get caught in the pedals or something like that. Not even Toyota has a perfect history as an automaker, and they are the best Automaker overall.
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