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Ray-traced image of a piston engine. There may be one or more pistons. Each piston is inside a cylinder, into which a gas is introduced, either already under pressure (e.g. steam engine), or heated inside the cylinder either by ignition of a fuel air mixture (internal combustion engine) or by contact with a hot heat exchanger in the cylinder (Stirling engine).
Power piston (dark grey) has compressed the gas, the displacer piston (light grey) has moved so that most of the gas is adjacent to the hot heat exchanger. The heated gas increases in pressure and pushes the power piston to the farthest limit of the power stroke. The displacer piston now moves, shunting the gas to the cold end of the cylinder.
A few designs use a 'fully floating' design that is loose in both components. All pins must be prevented from moving sideways and the ends of the pin digging into the cylinder wall, usually by circlips. Gas sealing is achieved by the use of piston rings. These are a number of narrow iron rings, fitted loosely into grooves in the piston, just ...
A variation of the opposed-piston design is the free-piston engine, which was first patented in 1934. Free piston engines have no crankshaft, and the pistons are returned after each firing stroke by compression and expansion of air in a separate cylinder. Early applications were for use as an air compressor or as a gas generator for a gas turbine.
A steam engine is a heat engine that performs mechanical work using steam as its working fluid. The steam engine uses the force produced by steam pressure to push a piston back and forth inside a cylinder. This pushing force can be transformed by a connecting rod and crank into rotational force for work.
The free-piston Stirling cooler (FPSC) is a completely sealed heat transfer system that has only two moving parts (a piston and a displacer), and which can use helium as the working fluid. The piston is typically driven by an oscillating magnetic field that is the source of the power needed to drive the refrigeration cycle.
A camshaft operating two valves. A camshaft is a shaft that contains a row of pointed cams in order to convert rotational motion to reciprocating motion.Camshafts are used in piston engines (to operate the intake and exhaust valves), [1] [2] mechanically controlled ignition systems and early electric motor speed controllers.