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Gasoline engines take in a mixture of air and gasoline and compress it by the movement of the piston from bottom dead center to top dead center when the fuel is at maximum compression. The reduction in the size of the swept area of the cylinder and taking into account the volume of the combustion chamber is described by a ratio.
Despite the rough start, noisy and dirty engine, and the difficult gear shifting, new technologies such as the production line and the advancement of the engine allowed the standard production of the gas automobiles. This is the start, from the invention of the gas automobile in 1876, to the beginning of mass production in the 1890s.
A gasoline engine burns a mix of gasoline and air, consisting of a range of about twelve to eighteen parts (by weight) of air to one part of fuel (by weight). A mixture with a 14.7:1 air/fuel ratio is stoichiometric, that is when burned, 100% of the fuel and the oxygen are consumed.
Lean-burn gas engines are almost always turbocharged, resulting in high power and torque figures not achievable with stoichiometric engines due to high combustion temperatures. Heavy duty gas engines may employ precombustion chambers in the cylinder head. A lean gas and air mixture is first highly compressed in the main chamber by the piston.
A circa-1970 AMC 232 automotive engine. A petrol engine (gasoline engine in American and Canadian English) is an internal combustion engine designed to run on petrol (gasoline). Petrol engines can often be adapted to also run on fuels such as liquefied petroleum gas and ethanol blends (such as E10 and E85).
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).
Some engines convert heat from noncombustive processes into mechanical work, for example a nuclear power plant uses the heat from the nuclear reaction to produce steam and drive a steam engine, or a gas turbine in a rocket engine may be driven by decomposing hydrogen peroxide. Apart from the different energy source, the engine is often ...
The first person to build a working four-stroke engine, a stationary engine using a coal gas-air mixture for fuel (a gas engine), was German engineer Nicolaus Otto. [4] This is why the four-stroke principle today is commonly known as the Otto cycle and four-stroke engines using spark plugs often are called Otto engines.