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Engine Types

The blocks in most internal-combustion engines are in-line designs or V designs. In-line designs are arranged so that the cylinders stand upright in a single line over the crankshaft. In a V design, two rows of cylinders are set at an angle to form a V. At the bottom of the V is the crankshaft. In-line configurations of six or eight cylinders require long engine compartments found more often in trucks than in cars. The V design allows the same number of cylinders to fit into a shorter, although wider, space. Another engine design that fits into shorter, shallower spaces is a horizontally opposed, or flat, arrangement in which the crankshaft lies between two rows of cylinders.

Engines become more powerful, and use more fuel, as the size and number of cylinders increase. Most modern vehicles in the United States have 4-, 6-, or 8-cylinder engines, but car engines have been designed with 1, 2, 3, 5, 12, and more cylinders.

Diesel engines, common in large trucks or buses, are similar to gasoline internal-combustion engines, but they have a different ignition system, Diesels compress air inside the cylinders with greater force than a gasoline engine does, producing temperatures hot enough to ignite the diesel fuel on contact. Some cars have rotary engines, also known as Wankel engines, which have one or more elliptical chambers in which triangular-shaped rotors, instead of pistons, rotate.

Electric motors have been used to power automobiles since the late 1800s. Electric power supplied by batteries runs the motor, which rotates a driveshaft, the shaft that transmits engine power to the axles. Commercial electric car models for specialized purposes were available in the 1980s. General Motors Corporation introduced a mass-production all-electric car in the mid-1990s.

Automobiles that combine two or more types of engines are called hybrids. A typical hybrid is an electric motor with batteries that are recharged by a generator run by a small gas- or diesel-powered engine. These hybrids are known as hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs). By relying more on electricity and less on fuel combustion, HEVs have higher fuel efficiency and emit fewer pollutants. Several automakers have experimented with hybrids. In 1997 Toyota Motor Corporation became the first to mass-produce a hybrid vehicle, the Prius. It became available in Japan in 1997 and in North America in 2000. The first hybrid available for sale in North America, the Honda Insight, was offered by Honda Motor Co., Ltd., in 1999.

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1. Read an additional text and try to understand it:

Diesel engine is an internal combustion engine in which air is compressed to a temperature sufficiently high to ignite fuel injected into the cylinder where combustion and expansion actuate a piston. It converts a chemical energy stored in the fuel into mechanic energy, which can be used to power freight trucks, large tractors, locomotives, and vessels. A limited number of automobiles also are diesel-powered, as are small electric power generators.

The diesel engine differs from other internal-combustion engines such as gasoline engines that induct and moderately compress an inflammable mixture of air and vaporized or gaseous fuel and then ignite it by an electric spark. It employs devices, and so it is often called a compression-ignition engine. The possibility of compression ignition had been first mentioned by the French physicists Sadi Carnot in 1824.The principle on which the modern automobile engine operates was conceived in 1862 by Alphonse Beau de Rochas, also of France; however, it was not applied to a practical engine until 1876, when the German engineer Nikolaus Otto built the first engine in which the charge (fuel-air mixture) was compressed in the cylinder before burning. This was the engine that Rudolf Diesel, a German engineer, undertook to improve when he started the experiments that led to the diesel engine.

The process described in Diesel's patents represented a cycle that differed from the cycle in existing engines only hi the rate of combustion of the fuel-air charge. The fuel would burn during the first portion of the power stroke of the piston so slowly that no pressure rise would occur. As a means of slowing down combustion to avoid instantaneous explosion of the spark-ignition engine, Diesel suggested inducting air into the cylinder and compressing it so highly that it would attain a temperature above the ignition point of an appropriate fuel, which would be gradually sprayed into the combustion chamber during the descent of the piston. This method of igniting fuel requires that the air be compressed to a pressure of at least 3,450 kilopascals (500 pounds per square inch), which produces a temperature of approximately 540°C (1,000°F).

Diesel presumably thought that any fuel would be suitable for an engine operating in the manner he described. He attempted to build an engine that would burn powdered coal, the cheapest conceivable fuel.

The coal-burning project, however, was soon abandoned, and an o il-burning version of the engine was completed in 1897. The fuel economy of Diesel's engine proved to be better than that of any other existing power plant. The engine, however, was not rapidly adopted. Until his death in 1913, Diesel insisted that all engines manufactured under his licenses be made to operate with combustion at practically constant pressure, as described in his 1893 patent. This restriction meant that the engines had to run at a very low speed, and thus possible design improvements were delayed. The early diesel engines were so large and heavy in proportion to their power output that they had no application other than as stationary power plants. The first marine installation of a diesel engine was completed in 1910; the diesel engine became the primary power plant for submarines during the World War II. The first diesel engine that was small and light enough for use in automobiles was built in 1922 in Germany, and it opened up numerous fields of application that had previously been closed to diesel engines because of their low specific power output. The higher-speed diesel-engines do not follow the slow-burning cycle originated by Diesel. Fuel is injected into the cylinder near the end of the compression stroke and burned rapidly, with sharply rising pressure, while the piston is near its dead-center position. Only the compression-ignition and fuel injection of Diesel's original engine are retained in the modern high-speed version Since the mid-1940s the diesel engine has become the predominant source of industrial power throughout the world for units up to roughly 5,000 horsepower, principally because it is capable of burning a low-grade fuel at a comparatively low rate of consumption per horsepower per hour. Relatively unrefined fuels can be burned by a diesel engine because of the nature of its fuel-injection system and combustion process.