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The efficiency of internal combustion engines depends on several factors, the most important of which is the expansion ratio. For any heat engine the work which can be extracted from it is proportional to the difference between the starting pressure and the ending pressure during the expansion phase.
The theoretical maximum efficiency of a heat engine, the Carnot efficiency, depends only on its operating temperatures. Mathematically, this is because in reversible processes, the cold reservoir would gain the same amount of entropy as that lost by the hot reservoir (i.e., d S c = − d S h {\displaystyle dS_{\mathrm {c} }=-dS_{\mathrm {h ...
In thermodynamics, the thermal efficiency is a dimensionless performance measure of a device that uses thermal energy, such as an internal combustion engine, steam turbine, steam engine, boiler, furnace, refrigerator, ACs etc.
The maximum efficiency (i.e., the Carnot heat engine efficiency) of a heat engine operating between hot and cold reservoirs, denoted as H and C respectively, is the ratio of the temperature difference between the reservoirs to the hot reservoir temperature, expressed in the equation
This formula only gives the ideal thermal efficiency. The actual thermal efficiency will be significantly lower due to heat and friction losses. The formula is more complex than the Otto cycle (petrol/gasoline engine) relation that has the following formula:
Volumetric efficiency (VE) in internal combustion engine engineering is defined as the ratio of the equivalent volume of the fresh air drawn into the cylinder during the intake stroke (if the gases were at the reference condition for density) to the volume of the cylinder itself.
The efficiency often reported for a particular engine, however, is not its maximum efficiency but a fuel economy cycle statistical average. For example, the cycle average value of BSFC for a gasoline engine is 322 g/(kW⋅h), translating to an efficiency of 25% (1/(322 × 0.0122225) = 0.2540).
As can be seen in the formula for maximum theoretical thermal efficiency in an ideal Brayton cycle engine, a high pressure ratio leads to higher thermal efficiency: = where PR is the pressure ratio and gamma the heat capacity ratio of the fluid, 1.4 for air.