Physics In an Automotive Engine

This presentation was first placed on the Internet in February 2003.

Essentially every part of an automobile engine, and in the entire vehicle, involves
applications of Physics, generally described as being Engineering principles. The two fields
are pretty close. Engineering generally has a more "practical" approach, of working to get
results that will be useful information toward actual mechanisms, without necessarily actually
understanding WHY some particular formula is as it is. Physics is less concerned with
applications or usage of results, and more concerned about understanding why some process
proceeds as it does.

In my entire life, I have only ever seen very superficial presentations regarding the
functioning of an automotive engine, usually just enough to tell various alternatives apart!
Therefore, I have felt it appropriate to present a Physics perspective on the subject!

I am going to assume that you have at least a vague understanding of what goes on in an
automotive engine, and that words like piston, crankshaft, connecting rod, and cylinder are
understood.

In this drawing, we are looking

at the end of the crankshaft,
and the crankshaft is going to
rotate counter-clockwise.
Therefore, at this moment, the
crankshaft is pushing the
piston upward in the cylinder,
and it is currently half way up.
This is during the stage called
Compression, where the gas-
air mixture inside the volume
above the piston is getting
compressed by the upward
movement of the piston.

I'm going to simplify some

things to clarify some points,
such as treating valves as being
able to operate instantly, which
they definitely do not do in real
life. However, if the intake
valve had closed when the
piston was at is lowest point (90° of crankshaft rotation before this drawing), the total amount
of gas-air mixture in the COMPLETE cylinder (initially at approximately atmospheric
pressure of 15 PSIA) is now already squeezed into just the volume of the cylinder above the
piston. If you think about it, the initial gas-air mixture is here already squeezed into HALF its
original volume, and so it is already at about TWICE the initial pressure (or now 30 PSIA).
We should clarify that pressures can be described in two different ways, Absolute and Gauge.
In this case, we know that the air started out at the natural pressure of 15 PSI, which is an
Absolute pressure, so it is sometimes written PSIA. If you measured that pressure with an air
pressure gauge, it would read 0 PSI, because there is no difference in pressure from natural.
This is called gauge pressure, and would be written 0 PSIG. They mean the same thing, and
absolute pressure is always 15 higher than gauge pressure. Our drawing therefore shows a
situation where the pressure inside the cylinder is now at 30 PSIA or 15 PSIG.

This discussion is going to be about the so-called spark-ignition or Otto cycle engine, the
process that virtually all cars and trucks operate on. There are a couple common alternatives:
The compression-ignition or Diesel cycle and the Brayton or Joule cycle. The majority of this
discussion actually applies to all three, but there are some differences. In Physics-talk, an
Otto cycle has an isentropic compression, followed by a constant volume combustion
explosion, followed by an isentropic expansion. In contrast, a Diesel cycle has an isentropic
compression followed by a NON-explosive combustion at (relatively) constant pressure,
followed by the isentropic expansion. Enough of that! They're much alike in many ways, and
you can consult any College Engineering textbook regarding the differences.

If we discuss a very popular engine, the so-called small-block Chevy V-8 engine, we can put
some numbers in here. The bore (diameter of the cylinder) is 4", and the stroke (twice the
crankshaft throw radius) is 3.5". The volume of that cylindrical volume is then (PI) * R2 * H
or 3.1416 * 2 * 2 * 3.5 or around 44 cubic inches. (Since that engine has eight cylinders that
are each that volume, its total 'displacement' is 44 * 8 or around 350 cubic inches. This engine
is generally called the Chevy 350 V-8.)

The area shown at the top of the drawing is an additional volume that remains even when the
piston is at the very highest point, a location called TDC for Top Dead Center, which will
mean more in our second drawing. The space above the piston at TDC is carefully designed.
In this specific case, it has a
volume of around 6.3 cubic
inches.

When the piston began its

upward movement (at BDC,
bottom dead center), there was
then a volume of gas-air
mixture above it of (44 + 6.3)
or 50.3 cubic inches. When the
piston has gotten to TDC, as in
this drawing, all that gas-air
mixture has now been
compressed into the remaining
6.3 cubic inches. The ratio of
these numbers, 50.3 / 6.3 is
called the Compression Ratio
of the engine. In this case, it is
about 8.0.

This drawing shows the

moment when that gas-air
mixture is most compressed. The 8.0 compression ratio means that the 15 PSIA beginning
mixture, is now at about 8.0 times that pressure, or around 120 PSIA. (Technically not
precisely, because of some really technical characteristics of what happens when gases are
compressed isentropically.) The cylinder compression is measured and is essentially this
number. Except that that device is a gauge, so the reading would be 105 PSIG.

Most superficial descriptions of automotive engines then say that the gas-air mixture is
ignited at that moment and that the even higher pressure of the exploding gas drives the
piston down, turning the crankshaft. Reference is usually even made of 'advancing the timing'
of the ignition spark, so it occurs maybe 10° or 20° BEFORE TDC, so the explosion has a
moment to build up its full power by the time it gets to TDC. If you look at this drawing for a
while, you should be able to see that that is impossible! If the explosion (and all its effects)
occurred exactly at the moment shown in this drawing, at TDC, the crankshaft would not be
given any rotation at all! Virtually the entire force of the explosion initially acts to try to drive
the piston, connecting rod and crankshaft downward, out of the bottom of the engine, without
giving it any rotation at all! (When this actually happens, VERY bad things tend to happen to
the engine!)

All actual internal combustion engines rely on KEEPING that explosion pressure for as long
as possible! In Calculus terms, the total effect regarding rotating the crankshaft is the Integral
of the net force actually applied to the crankshaft by that connecting rod for as long as there is
explosive pressure inside the cylinder. In an engine that is operating properly, contributions
to this Integral begin at the instant of ignition and end when the exhaust valve begins to open.
The instantaneous force applied as torque in rotating the crankshaft continuously changes
during this "power stroke". It actually begins with a slight negative contribution since ignition
is timed to occur before TDC, but not much pressure yet develops since the flame is still
spreading inside the cylinder. The contribution becomes exactly zero at TDC, and then
quickly rises as the internal burning and pressure continues and the leverage angle at the
crankshaft improves. Eventually, the piston going down reduces the pressure, and engine
cooling also does, and good design times the exhaust valve to begin opening about when
productive torque is no longer available.

So, from a truly accurate (Physics) perspective, a VERY complicated graph of resultant
torque would first need to be determined, and then that graph would be Integrated to
determine actual engine torque generated, at that engine speed and under those conditions of
spark advance and the rest. Such analysis is rarely actually done, and nearly always, simply
experimental measurements of real engines is found by experiment to learn these things.

You might note that the pressure must be maintained within the cylinder throughout the entire
power stroke for decent performance. This explains why an engine loses much of its power
once the piston rings are worn (and therefore leaking pressure) or the valve seats become
worn or distorted (and therefore leaking pressure). If the engine actually just relied on the
instantaneous effects of the explosion, worn rings or valves would be of minimum
importance, but the fact that the basic design relies on HOLDING the pressure before
actually using it make those components extremely important.

It turns out to be sort of fortunate that the "speed" of the explosion of the gasoline-air mixture
is relatively slow! Under the conditions that generally exist inside a cylinder (during highway
cruising), the flame front velocity is usually around 90 feet per second, or 60 mph. Mark's
Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers, Section 9, Internal Combustion Engines,
Flame Speed. Depending on exactly where the spark plug is located, that flame front must
travel two to four inches in order to ignite all the gases in the cylinder. At 90 ft/sec, this then
requires around 0.002 to 0.004 second for the combustion to complete. This might not sound
like much, but engines spin amazingly fast, and these brief time durations of combustion
always take many degrees of crankshaft rotation.

So even though the ignition occurred BEFORE TDC, and the very start of the combustion
actually acts to try to make the engine run backwards, the ignition timing is carefully
scheduled so that MOST of the combustion (and therefore combustion pressure on the piston
head) occurs AFTER TDC. By the time that a maximum amount of the gas-air mixture is
burning, the crankshaft has rotated a slight distance past TDC. This situation, and its
consistency (due to consistency of the quality and burning characteristics of the gasoline),
enables a modern engine to avoid seriously trying to spin backwards! The mathematics below
shows that, for an engine speed around 1500 rpm (a normal driving situation) this is
commonly around 10° AFTER TDC, when the greatest explosion pressure is present in the
combustion chamber. Let's look at some preliminary calculations.

It is very well established that the explosion, and therefore the heat created, causes the gases
in the combustion chamber to obey standard rules of Chemistry, such as the Ideal Gas Law.
Because of the sudden heat, the gases try to expand immediately, but they cannot, so the
pressure in those hot gases greatly and rapidly increases. Very consistently, the explosion
pressure in an internal combustion engine rises to between 3.5 and 5 times the compression
pressure. Since our example engine had a compression pressure of 120 PSIA, this results in a
momentary explosion pressure that peaks at around 500 PSIA.

Since the piston is 4" in diameter, the top surface of it is just PI * (4/2)2 or around 12.6 square
inches. Each of those square inches experiences the 500 PSI(G) pressure, so the total force
then instantaneously applied to the top of the piston is 12.6 * 500 or around 6300 pounds.
(OK. It is ACTUALLY the 500 PSIA, but there is natural air pressure pressing against the
UNDERSIDE of the piston as well, so the NET effect we are interested in is due to the
GAUGE pressure. Not too
different, but slightly!)

Because of the geometry of the

situation when the crankshaft
has progressed 10° after TDC,
the force diagram indicates that
this downward force must be
multiplied by (approximately)
the sine of 10°, in order to
determine the tangential force
applied to the crankshaft.
Approximately, because the
connecting rod is no longer
parallel with the axis of the
cylinder bore, the actual angle
being slightly higher, and an
exact angle is easy to calculate
with a thorough analysis. For
now, 10° will give an
approximate result for our purposes.

Therefore, the tangential (rotative) force actually transferred to the crankshaft is around 6300
* sin(10) or 6300 * 0.174 or around 1100 pounds. Since this force is applied to the throw of
the crankshaft, at 1.75" radius from the centerline of the crankshaft, the torque transferred to
the crankshaft is therefore 1100 * 1.75" or 1100 * 0.146 foot or 160 foot-pounds of torque.
This calculation is in ball-park agreement with the published maximum torque curves for
such engines, at 1500 rpm.

Notice that the radial force applied to the crankshaft (bearings) is around 6300 * cos(10) or
around 6200 pounds! At that moment, the vast majority of the power of the explosion is
trying to drive the crankshaft down out of the engine, without rotating it! And in seriously
trying to abuse the bearings! Without engine oil, under pressure, in the bearings, they do not
last long with 6200 pounds force against them!

In traditional automotive thinking, this sort of makes sense! As long as the piston rings do not
leak too much and the valves do not leak too much, then those expanded gases inside the
combustion chamber cannot escape. That means that, until the exhaust valve starts to open,
all the pressure will act to push the piston downward. In order to get the most total power, it
makes sense to keep that pressure acting as long as possible. This means that having the
maximum pressure developed as soon as possible after TDC gives the most possible available
degrees of productive crankshaft rotation. The benefit of this is seriously affected by the fact
that, as the piston moves downward, the volume inside the combustion chamber increases, so
the pressure drops (Ideal Gas Law). From a beginning combustion pressure of 500 PSIG in
our example, at the later instant when the crankshaft had rotated 45° the volume has
increased such that the pressure drops to around 200 PSIG (without any leakage) and by the
time the crankshaft has advanced 90° the pressure is down to around 125 PSIG. The
AVERAGE pressure during this 90° of rotation is referred to as Mean Effective Pressure
(mep) and is commonly around 200 for common engines under power. (A V-8 engine that is
a four-cycle requires each piston to provide the engine power for 90° of crankshaft rotation.)
(This description is for best conditions, fairly high power and revs).

There are several important points to be made here.

• At lower engine speeds, such as at idling at say 500 rpm, the very same explosive
force is created, but since the crankshaft is rotating only 1/3 as rapidly, the maximum
pressure tends to occur much closer to TDC, say around 3° or 4° after TDC. The sine
of 3° is around 0.052, so only around 57 foot-pounds of torque are (momentarily)
transferred to the crankshaft. The relatively long times involved allow moderate
leakage past the rings and through valve leakage. The main effect, though, is that the
gases inside the cylinder are cooled by the presence of the water-cooled metal
(cylinder walls) engine block and head. This cooling is necessary, to permit lubricants
to keep the engine running reliably, but it takes an amazing amount of energy from
the cylinders! If an engine is being operated at its rated 200 HP, the cooling system
would then be removing around an ADDITIONAL 400 HP worth of energy from the
cylinder walls and heads (and then simply throwing that energy away)! (This is part of
why internal combustion engines have such terrible overall efficiency, rarely higher
than the low 20% range (discussed below).
 The engine cooling system must be able to remove all that heat when the engine is
under full load and power, so cooling systems are really designed to be pretty
efficient. At 5,000 rpm, there is only about 0.003 seconds available to remove most of
the extreme heat from the cylinder walls and head, and the gases inside start out at
around 4000°F. As that heat is removed from the cylinder walls and head, the gases
inside cool down. At 5,000 rpm, and in 0.003 second, the amount of cooling is
limited. But now look at that same engine while idling at 500 rpm. That (cold) 200°F
water flowing through the block and heads now has ten times as long to cool
everything as the piston descends. In ten times as long, the gases inside the cylinder
can get really cooled off. That is bad because lower temperature means lower pressure
(Ideal Gas Law) and so less pressure is left to push down on the piston.

Between the natural (Ideal Gas) pressure reduction due to the expansion as the piston
goes down, and the forced cooling system cooling the gases and therefore also
reducing the pressure, the momentary 500 PSIG that existed near TDC quickly
dissipates, and there is a rather brief and somewhat weakened force/pressure pushing
the piston down to create productive work. The mep drops way off and the full 90° of
productive effect does not occur.

At even slower engine speeds, the engine is not able to reliably create the necessary
amount of torque necessary to overcome friction and to drive the water pump,
alternator and other systems, and to provide enough momentum to a flywheel to do
the work of exhausting, intaking and compressing the gas-air mixture for the next
explosion. This is why an automotive engine cannot run reliably at under an idling
speed, often around 500 rpm, which is necessarily higher when the added load of an
air conditioner is running (generally then at least 700 rpm) because it requires
additional torque/horsepower.

• At higher engine speeds, the crankshaft is rotating more rapidly so that it is farther
past TDC at the moment of maximum dynamic pressure in the cylinder (even though
the ignition advance has been increased even more). This again creates essentially the
same explosive pressure in the cylinder. But now everything occurs in a shorter time,
so less leakage can occur and less gas cooling occurs to the cooled walls of the engine
block and head. This allows the advanced crankshaft angles to be more able to
transfer torque to the crankshaft. Our initial 6300 pounds of force on the top of the
piston is reduced (by the increase in volume, since the piston has moved downward
more than half an inch) to around 2500 at the point that it is 45° past TDC. This
indicates that the torque transferred to the crankshaft at that instant would be 2500
pounds * sin(45°) * 0.146 foot or 250 foot-pounds of torque.
• At extremely high
engine speeds, this is
all still true, except that
the slowness of the
burning always causes
some of the gas-air
mixture to not even
burn until well after
TDC. This results in a
delay and a time-
spreading of the
maximum dynamic
pressure, to occur even
later after TDC. This
causes the first few
degrees of crankshaft
rotation to not yet have
the full pressure
developed inside the
combustion chamber.
(This cannot be
avoided and is due to
the slow speed of the spread of the flame inside the cylinder.) Therefore the mean
effective compression pressure starts to drop off at extremely high engine speeds.
(There are less degrees of crankshaft rotation available before the exhaust valve starts
to open) Therefore the torque transferred to the crankshaft drops off at very high
engine speeds, which is one of the main reasons for a "top end" of engine
performance. (There are other reasons: At such high engine speeds, the intake and
exhaust valves are not open very long, and so the removal of waste gases and the
intake of new fuel-air mixture to replace it becomes less efficient. Air flow speeds
through intake manifolds and exhaust systems becomes very high so extra frictional
resistance exists. And of course, there is the matter of making sure the engine doesn't
fly apart!

In our example engine, at the situation shown here, our effective compression
pressure is only 30 PSIG (the piston now being halfway down or a 2:1 compression
ratio). Therefore the combustion pressure is only around 125 PSIG and the total force
on the piston is around 1600 pounds. So even though the geometry is the best
possible, with a sine(90°) = 1.0, the total torque transferred to the crankshaft is around
1600 * 1.0 * 0.146 or around 230 foot-pounds of torque. In real engines, it is usually
actually less than this because the cooling system has already removed some heat
from the gases. The exhaust valve usually begins to start to open about then, since
there is relatively little benefit in staying closed due to the much lower pressure and
force on the piston, which then releases the remaining pressure in the combustion
chamber.

• These two effects just described, the extensive cooling and leakage at low rpm and the
reduced (delayed) effective compression pressure at high rpm, are the primary reasons
that an engine has a "torque curve". The actual torque developed would be relatively
constant at various engine speeds except for these two effects.
• Nearly everyone's impression about "octane ratings" of gasoline are exactly opposite
of what is the truth! Low octane gasoline burns VERY rapidly, so rapidly (and
somewhat unpredictably) that the crankshaft angle might not always get to TDC
before maximum pressure is developed. This both wastes some of the explosion
power (fighting itself as regarding rotating the crankshaft) and represents the
possibility of extreme wear on engine pistons and bearings, as compared to slower-
burning higher octane gasolines. Because high-octane gasoline burns more slowly, it
is less subject to "engine knock" (too much combustion before TDC) and generally is
able to produce more total engine torque because of the more reliable geometrical
advantage of the later crankshaft angle.
• It was discovered long ago that there was an advantage of triggering the ignition spark
several degrees of crankshaft BEFORE TDC. Otherwise, the maximum pressure only
develops so long after TDC that the piston has dropped too far and less pressure and
force are created, as described above. This spark advance situation causes the
interesting effect that an engine begins building up combustion pressure BEFORE
TDC, which actually would have the effect of making the engine rotate backwards!
Some early engines had a serious susceptibility to this, and many people who used
early crank starters (before electric starters) were seriously injured when the engine
kicked backwards.

Under the conditions of our engine running at 1500 rpm, the "flame-front speed"
(essentially the rapidity of the burning) is around 90 feet/second inside the
combustion chamber. A little geometry and algebra easily shows that the flame front
has progressed across half of the combustion chamber (2") while the crankshaft has
rotated around 18°. If the ignition spark was timed for around 15°BTDC, this would
suggest that the maximum pressure in the combustion chamber would then occur
around 18° later or 3° after TDC, as is commonly intended.

The actual reality is quite a bit more complicated than this, and we have simplified
some things in the interest of clarity. As the flame-front progresses across a
combustion chamber, the exploding gases act to additionally compress the gas-air
mixture that has not yet ignited. The result is that the pressure created is not a
symmetric smooth curve, but rather a curve that has generally greater pressures in the
later portion of the actual combustion. Where we have considered the maximum
combustion pressure to occur when the flame-front has progressed halfway (2")
across the chamber, it generally occurs a little later than that due to these very
complicated effects.

Actually, a reference in Mark's Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers,

Section 9 states that the optimum spark advance is approximately 5/9 of the
combustion time. This means that more time of combustion happens BEFORE
TDC than after! This makes the point of the more powerful portion coming late in
the combustion process, to not only overcome that 5/9 of combustion that acted to try
to make the engine turn backwards, but also emphasizes the very small crankshaft
angles involved that are the main point of this description! If the combustion had
proceeded linearly (as we have implied in this simplified presentation) the engine
would not even run (with standard spark advance), since over half of the combustion
time occurs before TDC!
As with most everything else here, the situation is actually a little more complicated
than that! The force applied to the top of the piston is proportional to the pressure of
the gases applied to it, and THAT is proportional to the temperature of the gases
inside the combustion chamber (all other things being equal!) The early part of the
combustion process IS burning fuel and building up pressure, but the TOTAL
pressure is somewhat cumulative. In ritzy math terms, it would be called the Calculus
Integral of the pressure over time. So even though 5/9 of the TIME of burning may
occur before TDC, the pressure is still not fully developed by then, and the cumulative
pressure AFTER TDC is much higher. Which is why the maximum torque is
developed when the spark is advanced around 5/9 of the total combustion time. But
note that ALL of the combustion needs to be DONE before the piston is able to move
very far down the cylinder, again meaning that the maximum force (pressure) is
developed fairly close to when the crankshaft throw is nearly straight up, the worst
possible mechanical (dis)advantage.

Between the additional benefit of this later development of maximum combustion

pressure, and the negative value of the very early stages of combustion that occur
before TDC, we have for simplicity treated the two as effectively canceling out each
other, and that the entire combustion process occurred as if it happened
instantaneously at a single 3° to 10° ATDC crankshaft angle. In reality, they seem to
be relatively comparable effects, but there is no actual reason for insisting that they
exactly cancel out. Spark advance, fuel-air ratio, octane rating of the fuel, temperature
and many other effects affect each of them differently.

You can probably imagine why engine designers measure the performance of a new
engine at every possible crankshaft angle (actually spark advance angle) and RPM
speed, to determine the very best ignition advance for all situations. The math to try to
predict that precisely enough from theoretical bases is really complex and it is far
easier to simply build some engines and experimentally TRY many different
combinations of all those parameters. When they find some combination that
produces the most output torque and power (at a particular engine speed), they note
that and then teach the computer to provide that advance and that fuel-air mixture!

They actually have the freedom to create an "advance curve" for most power or for
best fuel economy. Usually, any vehicle you buy has an advance curve that is
somewhere in between. But this issue explains why there are "performance chips"
available for most computer controlled engines. Such chips simply replace the tame
ignition advance curve with one that is better for maximum performance. Not much
else is changed by such chips. They tend to cause poorer fuel economy and poorer
environmental performance.

I am somewhat surprised that no manufacturer has yet offered a "switchable chip"

capability! If three chips were installed, then normally the Middle (like previous
chips) would be in effect. When a cruise control was engaged, a maximum economy
chip would take over. When the driver hit a special GO button, for 30 seconds, a
maximum performance chip would take over. The best of three worlds, I would think!

If an engine were intended to run at a constant speed with a constant load, it would be
possible to fine-tune the exact best spark advance angle. However, vehicle engines
must be able to go from idle to maximum performance rather quickly. There are many
 other engine conditions that also affect the amount of ideal spark advance, such as the
relative richness of gas in the mixture and whether the air intake path is restricted or
open. All these things are important for the following reason. When the ignition spark
occurs substantially before TDC, a significant combustion pressure starts to build up
even before TDC. If the engine was not already spinning, this could act to make it
rotate backwards! Only the momentum of the crankshaft and flywheel makes it
overcome this backward torque to get past TDC when good things start to happen.

Under some circumstances, too much of the mixture burns before TDC. Prior to no-
lead gasolines, carbon deposits tended to develop inside the combustion chamber, and
these deposits would sometimes become very hot. When fresh gas-air mixture would
be introduced through the open intake valve, the hot carbon could spontaneously
ignite it before the spark plug fired. This condition, while the intake valve was still
open, would send a flame-front backwards up through the intake manifold and
carburetor, causing what is called a backfire, flames actually coming up out of the
carburetor. If the intake valve was nearly closed, then the explosion would try to
rotate the engine backwards, which causes incredible stresses in almost everything
and some internal part might break. Usually the head of the piston is what would lose,
and a part of the top of a piston would get blown out (down into the crankcase). The
engine would then make interesting wheezing sounds and it was essentially unusable
due to massive shaking and rattling! Since unleaded gasolines have been used, carbon
deposits are less common, and combined with computer controlled spark advance,
backfiring is now very unusual.

However, if too low an octane gasoline is used in an engine, the flame-front can
sometimes travel too rapidly across the combustion chamber. It might seem odd, but
LOW octane gasoline has faster flame-front speeds than HIGH octane gasoline does!
This causes too high a combustion pressure to develop during the 5/9 of the
combustion period that occurs before TDC. That cylinder then does not contribute to
the intended productive power but rather causes an effect that partially tries to make
the engine run backwards. This causes tremendous stresses to occur in an engine, and
the power of the explosion has no obvious method of release. The rotational
momentum of the engine and flywheel permit the engine to continue past this event,
but the instantaneous effect is usually a slight flexing of the top of the piston head,
which makes a very unique metallic sound. This situation is called "engine knock"
or "ping". It is quite undesirable. Regular engine knocking can cause a "blown
piston" where a hole is blown through the weakest surface of the combustion
chamber, the piston head.

• The numbers calculated above are Instantaneous values of the torque produced. In a
V-8 engine, the eight cylinders fire during two revolutions of the engine, so a single
cylinder has to provide the power for 90° of crankshaft rotation. Essentially, in a real
engine, this is from just after TDC to a point when the piston is slightly more than
halfway down the cylinder, when the exhaust valve begins to open. The torque
created right near TDC is minimal, it increases to a maximum value and then drops
off. When the torque of an engine is measured, it is the AVERAGE that actually gets
measured. Where we had calculated instantaneous torques as high as 300 ft-lb, the
average will always be less than that, in this case, around 200 ft-lb. If the torque is
calculated for every degree of crankshaft rotation, and an average taken of those 90
values, the result should be very close to the rated engine torque.
Attached is a simple computer printout of such an analysis for the engine we have been
discussing, at Engine Analysis. This particular analysis is very simplified, without ANY
adjustment for the cooling effects of the cooling system or even the fact that the exhaust
valve is designed to begin to open well before BDC. But it might provide a useful insight into
how these various things are all related.

A little more about the cooling system, which is so closely associated with greatly reduced
thermal efficiency of the engine:

In many engines, the radiator hose is around 1 1/2" in inside diameter, which gives around 2
square inches of cross sectional area, a situation that is true for most parts of a well designed
cooling system. The water pump pushes that water at around 15 ft/sec (10 mph) through the
passageways, when the automatic thermostat is fully opened. This means that about (15 * 12
* 2) 360 cubic inches of water per second can be circulated, which is about 12 pounds of
water per second. It is common for the water to be heated by around 15°F in taking that
wasted heat away from the cylinder walls and heads. It takes 1 Btu to raise one pound of
water by 1°F, so we're talking about a MAXIMIUM of (12 * 15) 180 Btu/second of heat
being removed. That might not sound like much, but it is! In an hour (3600 seconds), this
COULD BE about 650,000 Btu! (More than ten times as much heat as most entire houses
need in the dead of winter!) Down below, we will mention that 2544 Btu/hr is equal to one
horsepower, so this MAXIMUM wasted heat represents around 250 horsepower or more of
wasted energy from the gasoline (during hard acceleration, where the (stock) engine is
creating its maximum productive horsepower).

During normal driving, the amount of heat removed from the engine is less than this, for
several reasons. The modulating thermostat is generally only partially open, which only
allows a partial flow of what was described above. The combustion chambers do not contain
as much burning gasoline as during a drag strip run, so less fuel and therefore less energy is
present that needs to be dealt with.

We can therefore see that the cooling system is necessarily designed so that it CAN remove
an enormous fraction of all the energy/power that an internal combustion engine creates,
which causes the "overall thermal efficiency" of any conventional automotive engine to have
low thermal efficiency, even separate from all the mechanical losses related to the engine's
operation. The calculations are extremely complex, and include variations depending on
water flow rates and cooling system design, but they generally indicate that a conventional
internal combustion engine cannot have an overall efficiency of greater than around the low
30% range. As noted below, there have been some experimental engines designed that have
been measured at around 28%, but the most efficient production engines are around 25% and
most vehicles on the highways now have engines which have around 21% overall efficiency.

We might as well add another analysis here! This is NOT an analysis that qualifies for an
actual scientifically rigorous analysis, and is meant to simply provide some overall insights
regarding what happens to the heat created inside a standard engine.

We will consider a normal driving situation, of a constant 60 mph trip for exactly one hour
(covering 60 miles) on an Interstate highway. We will assume that the engine is this small-
block Chevy 350 we have been using as an example. We will further assume that the fairly
large vehicle will get exactly 20 MPG during this trip.
We can see that we will use up exactly three gallons of gasoline for this trip. Since each
gallon of gasoline contains around 126,000 Btus of chemical energy in it, we will therefore
use up 378,000 Btus of chemical energy.

That particular vehicle has a rear axle gearing ratio that causes the engine to turn around 1800
rpm to produce the power needed to maintain this constant 60 mph speed. Our engine
therefore spins 1800 times every minute for 60 minutes or a total of 108,000 times during that
hour trip. Four cylinders fire during each engine revolution, so we have a total of 432,000
cylinders fire during this trip.

Therefore, EACH cylinder burns an amount of gasoline (assuming proper air-fuel mixture,
ignition timing, etc) which converts about 378,000 / 432,000 or 0.88 Btu of chemical energy
into heat. So if we consider the firing of a single cylinder, we can say that about 0.88 Btu of
heat is created during the combustion of the gasoline inside the cylinder. We know that
energy cannot be created or destroyed, so this 0.88 Btu of heat energy must go somewhere!

We know that around 21% of that energy is able to be productively converted into moving
the vehicle, so this accounts for about 0.18 Btu.

We know that we brought in a fuel-air mixture which was around 44 cubic inches (at original
ambient temperature and pressure). Since we know that one pound of air takes up about 13
cubic feet at STP, the amount of mixture we put into the cylinder is about 1/500 pound of
mixture. The engine will heat that up briefly to near the 4,000°F that gasoline burns at, but
then due to the 5:1 expansion of those gases by the time the exhaust valve starts to open and
due to the effect of the cooling system, the temperature of the gases leaving the engine as
exhaust (under the conditions of this constant speed driving) can be around 700°F. (At drag
strips, the exhaust gases can be far hotter than that, where they can cause the exhaust headers
to glow reddish during nighttime runs. Since iron and steel begin to glow a dark red at around
800°F, we are assuming here that the exhaust is around the 700°F estimated here, due to not
causing any (usual) obvious glowing of the exhaust manifolds.)

We also know that the Thermal Capacity of air is around 0.24 Btu/pound/°F. We can
therefore calculate an approximate number for the amount of heat that the exhaust will carry
away from our engine during our one-hour trip. Our one cylinder would therefore send away
1/500 pound * (700 - 70) temp rise * 0.24 or around 0.30 Btu of heat.

By implication, we can say that the remaining 0.39 Btu (0.87 - 0.18 - 0.30) of the heat must
get carried away by the cooling system.

For THAT SPECIFIC SITUATION then, we can estimate that around 21% of the energy
becomes useful power to move the vehicle; 35% of the energy gets lost in the exhaust gases;
and 44% gets lost due to the cooling system and other radiative cooling effects.

An interesting side-note to this analysis is that around 1970, the productive efficiency of such
engines was only around 15% and cooling system thermostats were designed to cause the
cooling system to operate at around 20°F cooler than in today's engines, with the result being
that the exhaust then carried away a much larger fraction of the energy, around 45%, with the
cooling system and other radiation then accounting for around 40%.
During that constant-speed trip, in ONE HOUR the cylinders therefore created 378,000 Btus
of heat energy from the chemical energy that was in the gasoline. Of that energy, only about
79,000 Btus of that energy was converted into moving the vehicle, while 132,000 Btus was
lost in heat in the exhaust and 166,000 Btus was lost through the cooling system and by
radiation.

We might also note that this analysis was for an engine speed of 1800 rpm and at minimum
throttle opening. If that same engine was operating at 5400 rpm, it would clearly use around
three times the amount of gasoline, and since maximum power would then be desired, the
fuel-air mixture would likely be more rich. So we might easily then be looking at a situation
which would be dealing with far over a million Btus per hour of chemical energy that was
being converted into heat. Of that energy, the cooling system (and natural radiation) disposes
of 166,000 Btu/hr and the exhaust gases dispose of an additional 113,000 Btu/rh of heat. All
this to produce 79,000 Btu/hr of productive work in powering the vehicle! Separate from
pointing out here the incredible wastefulness of the operation of all internal combustion
engines, we mention these numbers because a COMPLETE medium-sized house in a cold
climate generally only requires around 50,000 Btu/hr on the coldest February night! Vehicle
engines THROW AWAY heat at several times the rate your house uses similar heat that you
pay heating bills for!

It seems to me that a Doctoral Thesis might be available in Engineering for a gearhead

student! The TEMPERATURE of the exhaust seems certain to have a direct relationship with
the camshaft lobe shape of the exhaust valve cam. I am not aware that anyone has ever
carefully researched that issue. But in a very tame engine, where the exhaust valve waited
until later in the power stroke before starting to open, the Ideal Gas Law expansion of the
gases would have dropped to a low temperature, while in a wilder engine where, in order to
improve breathing of the engine, the exhaust valve opened far earlier, the gases should go
into the exhaust header at both higher pressure and higher temperature. There may be a way
to identify some aspects of a camshaft by simply measuring the (max) temperature of the
exhaust! Just a thought!

There is a linked presentation in this Domain which analyzes the performance of vehicles
regarding the usage of the productive power supplied by any power source, which discusses
the aerodynamic drag (front of the vehicle having to push air out of the way and rear of the
vehicle causing turbulence drag) and tire friction drag. It is possible to calculate the vehicle
performance with an "ideal engine" in it. For a medium sized car, the best that vehicle could
theoretically do is around 65 mpg of gasoline (using the energy in that gallon with the
minimal theoretical losses).note 1 A compact car has a theoretical maximum of around 80
mpg note 2, and motorcycles can have theoretical maximum efficiencies of over 150 mpgnote 3.
These figures are for driving at a constant highway speed. If someone wanted to be
intentionally deceptive, it would be possible to change the gearing of a vehicle to move at,
say, 3 mph, walking speed, where both aerodynamic and tire friction are far less, to get an
experimental mileage number that was far higher!note 4 Some companies have done this in the
past, and then never bothered to mention that the 150 mpg mileage figure they bragged about
in advertising was only for a walking speed! These inserted comments are to relate to the
seemingly endless line of products that are sold that claim to cause a standard car engine to
achieve 125 mpg or 150 mpg or 180 mpg, where readers tend to believe them! The Laws of
Physics limit the accomplishments of internal combustion engines as discussed here, and
such claims are made only to sell more products, and NO ONE can actually accomplish such
things in a conventional car at highway speeds!

If an ideal engine could be built, it would NOT have any cooling done to the cylinders
DURING the power stroke, to allow the pressure inside the cylinder to remain as high as
possible. However, up above, we mentioned that the cooling system, at 5,000 rpm engine
speed, only has around 0.003 second to remove the heat from the one cylinder that happens to
be firing at that moment. This causes a necessity of ALWAYS removing heat from the
cylinders, and by a cooling system that is VERY effective! This has a negative effect of
chilling down the gases inside the cylinder that we want to be pushing the piston downward!
So the very existence of the cooling system necessarily reduces the power and torque that an
engine can create! (The reality is that heat is still removed from the heated metal for a longer
time, continuously, but then the cooling system is primarily busy removing heat from a
DIFFERENT cylinder which has just fired. For simplicity, we are considering individual
cylinders. OK. We know that a total of about 180 Btu/second is being removed from the 5000
rpm engine, so in 0.003 second, a little over 0.5 Btu gets removed.

At 5,000 rpm, this is good! Only around 0.5 Btu gets removed while the piston is still trying
to do productive work, and in that very short period of time, the gases inside the cylinder
cannot be overly chilled, and so the overall performance is good. (Normal automobile cooling
systems are actually intended to start to overheat at high revs like this, for the lower speed
efficiency concepts being considered here!) In our constant-speed example above, our engine
was running at 1800 rpm, around 1/3 as fast, so the engine has around three times as long to
get rid of our 0.39 Btu of heat. However, there is a new problem! The cooling system is still
just as efficient as it was during the 5,000 rpm operation! So it COULD still be removing 0.5
Btu during each 0.003 second, or around a total of 1.5 Btus of heat removed from the
cylinder. This would cause FAR too much cooling of the gases in the cylinder and the
capability of producing horsepower or torque is greatly reduced! The gases could get cooled
so quickly that the torque production curve could drop to near zero very rapidly!

I know that you are way ahead of me now! At a 500 rpm idling speed, the very effective
cooling system has already had all sorts of time to BE ABLE TO remove virtually all the heat
from those hot gases before the crankshaft has even rotated by 45°. It can never even get to
having a beneficial mechanical leverage on the crankshaft before it has already gone fizzle!

See the situation? The cooling system MUST have adequate performance to be able to
remove enough heat when the engine is wound out, but that results in it having too good a
performance at all lower engine speeds. Such really good cooling performance makes engines
last longer, so they have THAT going for them! But the basic performance of all internal
combustion engines is tremendously reduced by how well the cooling system has to work!

The cooling system therefore also ALWAYS includes a "modulating thermostat" which
partially blocks off the water flow when the water temperature is less than the maximum it
was designed for. This minimizes the chance of the engine cooling system ever removing too
much heat and keeps the engine at a relatively constant operating temperature. The effects of
the thermostat (both its design temperature and its actual operation) have significant effects
on calculations regarding the efficiency of an engine, and can cause some calculations to be
off.
You might see why the cooling water pump is driven by the engine. At high speed, it runs
very fast, to pump a lot of water to accomplish the full cooling described above. At slower
engine speeds, the water is pushed more slowly so that it is able to capture less heat from the
cylinder walls and heads. But these things do not eliminate the problem. The slower water
speeds reduce some of the numbers described above, but it is still true that every running
vehicle constantly discards more of the gasoline's energy as wasted heat than it uses to move
the vehicle.

Older vehicles also had their very large radiators very exposed openly to the air at the front of
the vehicle, because at that time COOLING was considered the central factor (related to
engine survival!) As gasoline got more expensive and actual engine efficiencies have
improved, modern vehicles tend to have very small radiator openings in the front of a vehicle,
along the theme of causing the engine to operate at a higher temperature. With that smaller
opening, less air can pass through the radiator and also less air passes alongside the engine
itself, causing the now desirable higher engine temperatures! Now you know why! By the
way, long ago, it was easy to work on nearly any engine, because it was in such an open area
of the vehicle. Modern vehicles have many accessories right against the engine, so it is often
hard to actually even see the engine when the hood is opened! That great difference is
actually an intended difference!

In case you are curious, about 60% of the cylinder cooling is usually done through the
cylinder walls and the remaining 40% through cooling the heads. This will probably NEVER
come up in Trivial Pursuit!

Another related subject: Remember that I mentioned above that the standard cooling system
design intentionally allows the engine to start to overheat when really revved up? (The
expectation of the designers is that no standard driving would ever involve extended driving
at such high revs.) If a vehicle is to be used for towing a heavy trailer, generally there is an
extra-cost option of a "heavy duty" cooling system. When towing such a trailer, the engine
can spend longer times at higher engine speeds and loading, where it would normally
overheat. The extra cost "heavy-duty" cooling system rarely involves stronger water pumps
or bigger hoses. Almost always, it only involves REDUCING the size of the water pump
pulley (so it spins faster) and a thicker radiator (so there is more heat exchange surface to
cool the water). From the above discussion, you probably realize that such a "heavy-duty"
cooling system causes the engine to have WORSE efficiency and performance at low engine
speeds, due to excessive cooling of the engine cylinders then! Less heat remains in the hot
compressed gases in the cylinder pushing the piston downward, because the excessive
cooling lowered that pressure due to the Ideal Gas Law! (The modulating thermostat mostly
resolves this complication).

Prior to around 1980, cars and trucks had large radiators and very free airflow through them,
and engines ran fairly cool. Even the standard thermostats were 180°F, again permitting cool
engine operation, with the intention of enabling long engine life. When fuel efficiency and air
pollution came to be politically important, the advantages described above, of intentionally
reducing the effectiveness of the cooling system to reduce the cylinder heat losses to
(slightly) increase efficiency, started appearing. Now, nearly all vehicles have rather small
radiators and they have small grilles allowing air in to them! Modern radiators are actually
too small to avoid overheating and so electric cooling fans are necessary to keep engines
from boiling over. Similarly, modern thermostats are generally 195°F, which raises all the
engine temperatures by 15°F. Look in any engine compartment today and you see a clutter of
things surrounding the engine. That was not the case long ago, when free air flow around an
engine was desired for engine durability. Now, the highest possible engine operating
temperature is used, (reduced cooling performance described above) to improve engine
efficiency and performance, which also reduces the amount of air pollution created in the
process. Engine durability is less than it used to be, but people rarely seem to keep vehicles as
long as they used to, so it is apparently not considered a problem. The technology of motor
oils has greatly advanced, so that oil is able to last much longer in today's hotter engines than
old oil would have lasted.

Finally on this tangent: Consider dragsters (rails) in a 1/4 mile drag race. They have no
radiators or water pumps, but they are filled with (cold) water just before a race. That seems
certainly necessary to keep the engine from blowing up. But an ideal situation would be that
the water was ferociously boiling at the Finish Line when the engine was shut down, because
that would indicate the highest possible engine (cylinder) temperatures during the race. I
don't know if any research has ever been done on this, but I suspect that if two identical
dragsters raced, the one that had had its engine running 30 seconds longer before the race
should always win! (Unless the engine blows up!) The hotter engine cylinders should allow
several percent additional power to remain to drive the pistons downward, particularly at the
important start of the race. Engine durability would probably be severely reduced, but people
who drag-race only think of winning! (Notice how Physics shows up in unexpected places
and in unexpected ways?) (And, of course, that seriously overheated engine is more likely to
dangerously blow itself apart, too!)

Hemi Head Engine

For nearly 40 years, Chrysler has been aggressively promoting their hemi head engine. For
you gearheads, do you know WHY a hemi is supposed to be better? In my experience,
virtually no one seems to actually know! I wonder if Dodge and Chrysler salespeople even
know?

A hemi head is actually a (somewhat) hemispherical head. Virtually all the other styles of
overhead valve engine heads have relatively flat pistons and heads that have a relatively
shallow recess in their heads, for the combustion to occur. Remember the roughly 6 cubic
inches that must remain at TDC? With a 4" diameter cylinder, that equals roughly 1/2" in
cylinder height, near the sides near zero and near the spark plug maybe 3/4 inch. Now, a
cylinder has to have both an intake valve and an exhaust valve, both in the head (in overhead
valve engines, the most efficient designs). The flat shape of the usual combustion chamber
limits the diameter of those valves, to well under HALF of the entire distance across the
piston. An engine with 4" diameter pistons can therefore not have intake or exhaust valves
which are larger than about 1.5" in diameter. By the way, the INTAKE valve is always larger
in diameter than the exhaust valve. Do you know why? It is because the EXHAUST is
DRIVEN OUT by the upward motion of the piston, while the INTAKE is SUCKED IN by
the downward motion. It turns out that devices that suck air cause a lot more turbulence, and
so it is less easy to do. The larger intake valves are therefore needed to provide the SAME
necessary flow rates for the cylinder to be most efficient.

The hemi head uses a VERY deep combustion chamber, so that the distance across is about
half the circumference of a circle (1.56 * diameter) rather than being only slightly more than
the diameter. This allows a lot more available space for the two valves. The valves tend to
therefore be at odd angles to benefit from this added size. The SINGLE actual advantage of a
hemi head engine is that it has much larger diameter valves! This allows the fuel-air mixture
to get in easier and the exhaust to get out easier. Bigger valves is a very good thing, and the
hemi head design is the simplest way to provide the space for really large valves.

Since the hemispherical chamber is so tall, a flat-top piston would allow too much remaining
volume for a good compression ratio, so all hemi head engines have to have dome-top
pistons. So if you ever see a relatively flat-top piston, it is from a non-hemi, and a
significantly domed piston is always from a hemi. (An engine can have flat-top pistons
replaced with slightly domed pistons to increase compression ratio, but that is a very different
effect.) Also, if you happen to see an unusually large valve, it is likely to have come from a
hemi engine.

So, a hemi is not "magical" or anything, but merely is a design that permits bigger valves for
better engine breathing. There is no other significant advantage of it. And, actually, the
domed piston somewhat interferes with airflows and makes it less likely to get really uniform
distribution of the gas-air mixture, and really good removal of all exhaust products, so some
of the benefits of being a hemi are given up in exchange.

You may be aware that there are some newer engines that have four (smaller) valves per
cylinder. This provides the improved breathing of the hemi while not having the
disadvantages of domed pistons. But the engine is much more complex, and expensive.

Camshafts and another interesting idea!

This discussion, and ALL such discussions, always consider an "ideal" engine! One where
the valves open and close instantly and completely, to allow each of the four Otto engine
cycles to occur very distinctly and separately. However REAL engine valves are always
operated by a camshaft which has lobes shaped to push each valve open, against very strong
spring pressure, and then where those springs cause the valves to close after the camshaft
lobe has passed. The point being, each valve TAKES TIME to open and then to close! The
engine designer CHOSE a particular size and shape for the camshaft lobe for each specific
engine.

It turns out that since the valves take that much time to open and to close, the "valve timing"
meaning the shape and timing of the camshaft lobe shape and position OVERLAPS.

For example, the EXHAUST valve is ALWAYS designed to begin to open FAR BEFORE
BDC (bottom dead center) so it necessarily RELEASES the productive pressure inside the
cylinder during the POWER stroke. Even worse, the exhaust valve CONTINUES TO STAY
OPEN beyond the end of the exhaust stroke and it is still open well into the INTAKE stroke!
With BOTH valves then open, some of the fresh gas-air mixture being sent INTO the
cylinder goes completely through and OUT THE EXHAUST! In fact, much of the rich sound
of a high performance engine is due to this, where raw gas-air mixture goes through the
engine and is then ignited by the extremely hot metal surfaces of the exhaust manifolds!

But this is clearly extremely wasteful of the precious gas-air mixture that drivers pay for at
the gas pump! If you think about it, if an engine was IDEAL, there would be virtually NO
exhaust sound at all, even without any muffler. The already completely burned up end
products of the cylinder combustion would simply be squeezed out of the cylinder as the
piston rose.

So an engine's overall efficiency is also affected by the valve timing and duration. This
subject is very complex because both sides of the street are involved. IF an engine is to be
designed to produce maximum power, then it is important to get rid of as much of the old
exhaust gases in order to get more fresh gas-air mixture into the cylinder to burn. This can be
done by greatly INCREASING the length of time that the valves are open. It is essentially
conceded that a significant amount of unused fresh gas-air mixture goes through the engine
unused, in order to be able to create the absolute maximum amount of power. That means that
an engine that is set up for extra power is also WORSE on fuel efficiency. It might have
seemed that the opposite should be true, but the REASON that the engine creates more power
is because a LOT more fuel-air mixture goes through the cylinders, and the fact that a good
deal of that is lost is ignored!

Manufacturers therefore design very conservative camshafts for their vehicles to be sold, but
for their racecars that look the same, they have very different camshafts in them! Gearheads
know that there are STOCK camshafts, STREET camshafts, and various levels of RACING
camshafts. When the engine has a STOCK camshaft, it idles smoothly and starts easily. With
the most extreme racing camshafts (such as used in Dragsters), as peculiar as it sounds, the
valves virtually never close! Both valves are ONLY closed for a very brief time during the
early part of the POWER stroke, in order to use the generated power to drive the piston
downward. Beyond that, one or the other or both valves are at least partially open at all other
times!

Anyone can instantly HEAR the effects of an engine with any exotic camshaft, because of
that effect mentioned above regarding the rich sounds of exhaust when a lot of fuel is burning
IN THE EXHAUST HEADERS! Such engines are also nearly impossible to cause to idle
(with the valves rarely both being closed!) and so such engines tend to need to spin at 2,000
rpm or more to keep running (rather than the 550 rpm common in conventional cars with
stock camshafts). Finally, a normal starter motor is only able to spin an engine a little faster
than the needed 550 rpm for stable idling, so when you have an engine that cannot idle at
below 2,000 rpm, starting it is a real problem. Around 40 years ago, some creative drag-
racers discovered that they could cause a standard starter to spin fast enough if it was
powered by two or three or even four batteries in series, instead of the standard one battery.

In any case, the central point is that all camshafts have shapes which were developed by
experimental results! Thousands of failed designs eventually narrowed it down to cam lobe
shapes that are now used. Amazingly enough, there is virtually NO theoretical basis for
almost anything about a camshaft! It was all Trial and Error! And after a hundred years or so,
they have found cam lobe shapes that seem to be as good as they can be, whether for
economy or for power or anywhere in between. A Physicist goes crazy when some
technology advanced simply by an endless number of bad guesses! We prefer that there is
actually some REASON and LOGIC behind trying new variants!

The interesting idea!

For 130 years, the engine valves have been pushed open by camshafts and against very strong
valve springs. No one seems to have ever explored any other possibilities!
The thought that occurs to me is to get rid of the camshaft completely! Install VERY
POWERFUL electrical solenoids. It seems certain that a 100-watt or 1000-watt solenoid
should be able to OPEN a valve VIRTUALLY INSTANTLY! A second similar solenoid
should be able to CLOSE that valve just as fast.

Rather than the existing situation where each valve GRADUALLY opens due to the leverage
of the camshaft lobe, this concept would allow IMMEDIATE AND FULL FLOW. A
standard camshaft lobe causes each valve to follow a (roughly) sinusoidal path regarding
being opened. A mathematical Integration of that motion shows that the actual total airflow is
only around HALF of what would theoretically be possible. So, it seems to me that if
extremely strong solenoids forced the valves to SNAP open and closed, almost every aspect
of engine performance should improve ENORMOUSLY!

• There would be NO wasted gas-air mixture passing through the cylinders, because
those two valves would NEVER both be open at the same time! Better fuel mileage.
• The exhaust valve would NEVER open until AFTER the POWER stroke was totally
completed, so an increase in the net power output of the engine should result.
• With the intake and exhaust valves being WIDE OPEN instantly, far easier and better
flow of fuel INTO the cylinder should occur, meaning greater engine power output,
and far better purging of exhaust gases should also occur, allowing more available
volume in the cylinder for the next incoming INTAKE stroke.

BETTER fuel mileage AND much greater power production! Seems to me that Detroit
Engineers should have thought of this 50 years ago! But the concept of an engine without a
camshaft is probably too "outside the box" for the traditional thinking of corporate engine
designers! Oh, well! But that would certainly be one of MY first areas of exploration if I had
authority in Detroit! It sure sounds extremely obvious to me! Granted that there might be
technical problems that cause it to not be usable, but if Detroit is spending countless billions
on E-85 engine designs (dead meat!) and Hydrogen fuel-cells (20 to 50 years from now) and
battery power (a 1980s-90s concept which had dismally failed), spending a few bucks to try
really high-powered solenoids seems worth trying!

If you have actually followed all of this, you now pretty much know most of the design basics
in case you ever decide to invent your own engine for your car! Very few people seem to
have even heard of much of this, and very few auto mechanics seem to know about these
things or understand them. I sort of wonder how many of the Engineers at the automakers
really know the Physics behind what they make blueprints for! The mysterious way that large
free-flowing radiators gave way to the smaller obstructed radiators of today make me wonder
if they had really understood these things before 1980 or so! I would hope that engine
designers of 1910 knew most of these things, because it is all just simple physics! At least
they SHOULD HAVE KNOWN!

For discussion's sake, consider a hypothetical situation resembling the last drawing shown
above. The crankshaft throw is fully horizontal, for the greatest possible geometrical
mechanical transfer of torque to the crankshaft. Imagine that the full 6300 pound downward
force on the piston could be applied under these circumstances. The torque transferred to the
crankshaft would be 6300 * 1.0 * 0.146 or 920 foot-pounds of torque! This rather obvious
result is many times higher than any actual automotive engine can develop! It would also be
relatively constant, and would not decrease at high or low engine speeds.
This geometrical mechanical advantage was a standard feature of the old steam engine
locomotives, where the entire available steam force was always applied at the best possible
mechanical advantage. In comparison, internal combustion engines are rather pitiful
regarding mechanical efficiency! However, this hypot hetical arrangement is not possible in a
normal automotive engine. It is easy to see from geometrical analysis that the piston
necessarily has dropped exactly halfway down the cylinder, with the loss of almost all
compression advantages and there is no flexibility on this point.

It is not commonly known, and certainly seldom published, that the very best experimental
automotive internal combustion engines are only around 28% efficient, when considering the
energy in the gasoline and that actually developed in the spinning crankshaft. Many of the
common automobile engines today are only around 21% efficient. (This is actually
considered good, since common automotive engines of 1970 had BELOW 15% thermal
efficiency!) (It has actually risen a little from that.)

"Ground transportation vehicles are powered, by and large, exclusively by internal-

combustion engines. In passenger vehicles in particular, the thermal efficiency of the
[engine] cycle is of the order of 10 to 15 percent." from Mark's Standard Handbook for
Mechanical Engineers, Tenth Edition (1995), page 9-29.

(That particular reference had been composed for an earlier Edition of Marks of the late
1970s, and the number had gotten somewhat outdated by the 1995 Edition.)

In the discussion above, we have seen WHY the overall efficiency is so dreadfully low for
ICEs. The cooling system MUST get rid of around 40% of the fuel's energy, just to keep the
engine from melting down or warping and failing. And the exhaust gases MUST carry away
around another 40% of the energy from the fuel. That only leaves around 20% left which can
be converted into useful mechanical energy. Yes, tweaking the exhaust system to reduce hot
exhaust gas flow can help, but that also restricts the flow of air/oxygen INTO the cylinders
and also creates more work for the pistons to do in pushing the gases out. Ditto, adding a
turbocharger (a supercharger that increases the amount of oxygen/air pushed into the
cylinders) which is powered by the exiting hot exhaust gases generally DOES have a positive
benefit, but the improvement due to having more fuel-air to burn has to overcome the
significant power required to force the exhaust out even harder in order to spin the turbine in
the turbocharger. No free lunch!

By increasing the temperature of the thermostat, in other words, reducing the effectiveness of
the cooling system and making the engine run hotter, a SLIGHT improvement in fuel
economy is achieved. However, the hotter engine tends to heat incoming air up which
REDUCES the air density and therefore reduces the power produced by the engine. Now you
know WHY the engine seems to have more power if you replace the modern 195°F
thermostat with a 165°F one, but the engine creates more pollution due to poorer burning and
it also has worse gas mileage.

Engine manufacturers have come up with many dozens of different ideas to try to
(incrementally) reduce the heat carried away by the cooling system and/or the heat carried
away in the exhaust. But as just noted, all such changes tend to also have negative effects as
well as the desired positive ones. And so the fact that most vehicles now on the road have
around 21% overall thermal efficiency is NOT likely to significantly change, IF ICEs are
used in the future.

Comment: You have certainly noticed that car manufacturers have been trying to explore
hybrid cars, electric cars, fuel cell (hydrogen) cars, ethanol (E-85) (for a while) and many
goofy ideas. Yes, they partly are doing that because the public is wound up over all the
energy issues in the news. But doesn't it seem strange that they are spending billions of
dollars on ideas which never seem to work out? There IS a reason that they never bother to
tell us about! Around 2004, I discovered some PUBLISHED reports by the Oil Institute and
other related organizations, which presented the data on consumption, usage and supplies of
fossil fuel supplies. It scared the daylights out of me! Those (published) Reports were
somewhat tricky in how they present the data, where it was difficult to compare the values of
the data on consumption, usage and supplies (for each country and each year), but once the
data is converted into the same units, the SUPPLIES are VERY low. That data indicated that
the US (then) only had enough known petroleum to supply our current needs for just over
FOUR YEARS (if no imports were made). The people who think natural gas is the answer
for the future would see that only EIGHT years of supply of that was in the ground under
America. That data (now somewhat out of date) is at Energy Supplies. SEE why the
automotive engine manufacturers are trying to find some way to power the products they
hope to sell in the future?

YOU can actually confirm the overall efficiency for yourself with your own car! I will
use the example of one my Corvettes. At a constant 60 mph on a straight and level Interstate
Highway, I get around 25 mph, which sounds GOOD for a Corvette! OK. According to GM
information, the frontal area of the car is around 19 square feet, the aerodynamic coefficient
of drag (due to the shape of the car, and which is fairly constant for different speeds) is 0.330
and the tire resistance drag is around 0.015 (depending on tire type, inflation pressure,
temperature and speed). From this we can calculate that the Aerodynamic Drag at 60 mph (88
ft/sec) is 19 * 0.330 * (88)2/(13*32) pounds of force (the last factor being the air density in
slugs per cubic foot), which gives 116.7 pounds of aerodynamic drag, at 60 mph. (at 70 mph,
it is easy to calculate that it rises to 158.9 pounds.) Tire resistance drag is 0.015 * 3200
pounds (the vehicle weight) or 48 pounds at 60 mph (and around 60 pounds at 70 mph). This
makes the Total Drag as 116.7 + 48 or 164.7 pounds at 60 mph (and 218.9 pounds at 70 mph)
(and 51.9 + 32 or 83.9 pounds at 40 mph).

Clarification Note: Many articles and web-pages, and even many respected textbooks
(including Marks), contain a serious error regarding the subject of the previous paragraph.
They apparently see the V2 in the formula for Aerodynamic Drag, and they must believe that
is therefore referring to some relationship to Kinetic Energy (which is 1/2 * M * V2), so they
add in a 0.5 in their formulas! Nope! It only turns out that it is a fluke that there are two Vs in
there and they happen to be identical! The relationship is actually one regarding the analysis
of the Momentum (lb-ft) of the air colliding with the frontal area of the vehicle. FIRST, we
are HITTING the air with a velocity of 88 ft/second. SECOND, the AMOUNT of air that we
are hitting is given by the density of air times its cross-sectional area, times its "length" (per
second). The coefficient of drag is essentially telling how quickly the air gets out of the way
of the vehicle! So the correct formula is D = ρ * CD * S * V2, indicating the usual
designations for the air density rho, the coeffient of drag, the frontal area of the vehicle and
air velocity. The formula might be more clearly written as D = C D * V * ( S * V * ρ), where
the contents of the parentheses are simply the mass-flow rate of the air, each second (or slugs
/ second). Multiply this by the velocity and end up with a Force!
At 60 mph, the total required horsepower to overcome this and maintain a constant speed is
164.7 * 88 / 550 or 26.4 horsepower. (at 70 mph it is 40.9 HP, a considerably higher drag
load!) (the 550 is to convert feet-pounds per second into horsepower.) A horsepower is
equivalent to 2544 Btu/hr (from above) so this is 67,200 Btu/hr (26.4 * 2544) of needed (or
usable) output. In one hour of driving at that constant speed, we would therefore use up an
amount of energy equal to 67,200 Btu. (at 70 mph, 104,000 Btu.)

A gallon of nearly any type of gasoline contains around 126,000 Btu of chemical energy. In
the hour of driving, I would cover 60 miles and get the 25 mpg, which means that I would use
60/25 or 2.4 gallons of gasoline. That much gasoline has 126,000 * 2.4 or 302,000 Btus in it.
Since the car used 67,200 Btu to maintain that 60 mph constant speed, the overall thermal
efficiency is 67,200/302,000 or 22.2%.

At 70 mph, I tend to get around 21 mpg, and therefore would use up 3.3 gallons in traveling
those 70 miles, or a gasoline energy content of 420,000 Btu. So we would have
104,000/420,000 or around 24.8% overall thermal efficiency. Interestingly, the thermal
efficiency is actually higher at the higher speed, but it is more than overcome by the far
greater total drag, which is why gasoline mileage goes down at high speeds.

A primary reason for this disappointing efficiency is this unfortunate mechanical arrangement
where the majority of the force applied to the top of the pistons is NOT able to get transferred
into torque in the crankshaft but instead attempts to drive the whole crankshaft down out of
the engine. (Since pressure remains in the cylinder, it eventually gets to a point of having a
better mechanical advantage, but by then the pressure in the cylinder has dropped quite a bit
due to the piston lowering and the cooling system effectiveness.) A large amount of wasteful
frictional and cooling system heating is the result of this inherent characteristic of automotive
engines, and the engine bearings take a serious beating. The engine then needs a variety of
systems (lubrication system, cooling system, etc) to then discard all this heat energy that is
wasted.

We mentioned above that enormous amounts of heat must be removed (and discarded) from
the cylinder walls and heads, an amount generally equal to 100% to 150% of the rated output
of the engine. This should seem a shocking statement, that a 200 HP engine necessarily
wastes 200 HP to 300 HP of energy through its cooling system! A lot of this has to be wasted
because, when the explosion first created the maximum dynamic pressure in the cylinder, the
piston had nowhere to go, being virtually at TDC. (This is essentially the definition of the
Otto cycle engine, that of a constant volume combustion.) So those 4000°F gases are trapped
above the piston, surrounded by a really efficient cooling system! Before the crankshaft has
advanced enough degrees to start being able to transfer useful torque to the crankshaft, the
cooling system has necessarily already greatly cooled off the hot gases! Does this seem like a
poor design, or what? Enormous waste of energy is built into the design! ALL internal
combustion engines face this situation!

There is another way to indicate this poor overall efficiency of automotive engines. Consider
a small-sized, reasonably aerodynamic automobile, with an engine that is considered
efficient, traveling at a constant 60 mph on a highway, with no significant wind. Because of
the alleged efficiency, this vehicle gets 30 miles per gallon at that constant speed.

The total vehicle drag (F) can be shown to be around 140 pounds, 110 of which are due to
aerodynamic drag and 30 of which are due to tire resistance frictional losses. The total actual
power needed to overcome this drag is given by F * V (velocity). Our numbers are then 140
pounds * 88 feet/second or around 12,300 ft-lbs/sec. Dividing this by 550 converts it to
horsepower, or around 22 actual horsepower. (Very streamlined cars will have even lower
aerodynamic drag and so this required power could be even less).

Since this vehicle has a 30 mpg gasoline consumption, it would use up exactly two gallons of
gasoline to travel the 60 miles covered in one hour. Each gallon of gasoline contains about
126,000 Btu of available chemical energy. Therefore, two gallons contains 252,000 Btu, so
the vehicle is using 252,000 Btu/hr. It is a fact that 2544 Btu/hr is equal to one horsepower,
so this amount of energy in the gasoline represents around 100 horsepower.

The vehicle / engine efficiency would then be 22 hp / 100 hp, or around 22%, which confirms
the earlier statement about the overall efficiency of this equipment.

Another tangent!

Long ago, it occurred to me that NO ONE actually NEEDS or USES the 451 horsepower of a
recently advertised car! That such great power is only ever used for less than 30 seconds at a
time. That otherwise, most cars only need around 40 horsepower or less to cruise at constant
speed on an expressway. Detroit never seemed to realize that, and they designed many
vehicles with huge engines that were tremendous gas-guzzlers.

Around twenty years ago, in the late 1980s, I had a Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera, which was a
front-wheel drive car. I also had the carcass of an extremely old Volkswagen van from the
1960s. Something then occurred to me that has amazingly seemed to have never occurred to
anyone in Detroit! If you have followed all this stuff up to here, this should make incredibly
good sense to you! The rear axle of the Ciera didn't actually do much other than support the
rear end of the car. So I dragged the Volkswagen "pancake" engine and transaxle across my
yard and saw that it probably would have fit under the rear of the Ciera (if I removed the gas
tank and put it somewhere else, as it was the ONLY apparent interference!).

So I was considering adding the second engine to the Ciera! A TINY engine! As near as I
could tell, the pancake engine was flat enough that no actual changes should have been
necessary to the Ciera, to allow it to remain at the same height. In other words, from an
appearance point-of-view, the Ciera would have remained absolutely normal looking!

Have you caught on of why I thought this might be a good idea? At the time (late 1980s) I
was one of very few people who seemed to really care about fuel efficiency. But I thought I
had come up with a really good and really obvious solution. It seems to me that it still is just
as valid today!

I was aware that my Ciera generally got around 17 or 18 MPG on the highway, but it was fun
to drive because the 3.8 liter engine had a decent amount of power.

So, I intended to rig up the gas pedal where if it were pressed HALFWAY DOWN OR
FARTHER, the (front) Ciera engine would start up, but otherwise it would NEVER actually
be running! So during normal driving, the 1.2 liter Volkswagen engine would have powered
the car. I was confident that it would have gotten at least 30 MPG, and reasonably likely
around 35 MPG on the highway. The little engine had enough power to easily maintain the
Ciera at 60 mph highway speed. So the vehicle would have gotten about the best gas mileage
of any vehicle of that era!

Now say that I wanted to do a hole-shot from a stoplight, or wanted to pass a car on a two-
lane road. The Ciera engine would start up, and actually I would have had TWO engines both
accelerating the Ciera! A rear-wheel-drive AND a front-wheel-drive! It likely would have
had better acceleration than any other Ciera, due to the two engines!

So I would have wound up with a car that LOOKED absolutely normal, had acceleration at
least as good as original and maybe better, and yet possibly TWICE the gas mileage! Cool?

It turned out that my life got extremely busy and I never got around to doing that interesting
experiment! And since shortly after that I started driving my two Corvettes, and they are rear-
wheel drive, I never considered any personal motivation to remain! Also, I am not sure that I
would have wanted to maltreat a Corvette quite that badly!

I realize that adding an entire extra engine would add to the cost of manufacturing vehicles,
when the manufacturers hire people exclusively to find ways to eliminate a tenth of a penny
from the cost of the cigarette lighter! So maybe that is why they have never even thought of
this concept. Seems pretty obvious to me though!

I must admit that I had earlier personally tried a truly stupid idea that was vaguely similar,
and maybe those bad memories caused me to think of it during the 1980s. When I was in
College, I drove two 1956 Ford convertibles. That year happened to have a very tall trunk.
The motors in those cars were considered decently powerful, being V-8 292 cid engines. But
as a young kid who liked to fool around with cars, well ...

I happened to have rebuilt a Mercury 383 engine, and I had toyed around with the idea of
replacing the 292 with the 383 for, as Tim Allen would say "more power!&quot. But I
thought I came up with a better idea yet! I measured and measured and found a way to fit the
large 383 engine inside the rear trunk of the '56 Ford! I decided to install it backwards, with
the idea of having a normal (but much shorter) driveshaft. I got two spur gears, and put one
on the snout of the 292's driveshaft and the other was rigidly mounted to the actual second
driveshaft. The fact that the rear engine rotated backwards was then a good thing, where
either or both could then drive the car.

Well, it actually worked, for a few days! If I ONLY used the 292, and left the other
transmission out of gear, only the second driveshaft rotated, and everything worked pretty
normally. And I drove it a little with ONLY the 383 powering it. It was a little flaky but
generally worked fine, although I never really pushed it hard. The car's handling was VERY
strange, as the big old engine's 500 extra pounds so far in the rear made it somewhat spooky
to drive.

I was still young, and my knowledge of Physics and Engineering was still limited. That's my
story and I am sticking to it! But I had not realized that the big-bore 383 had a torque curve
that was at much lower engine speeds than the smaller 292. On the single day when I fired up
both engines and thought I was going to have really impressive acceleration from over 500
hp, that little detail very quickly sheared off all the teeth of the gears! As I was sitting just a
foot away, I was hit by several of them as they exited the scene! I guess there was such a
great torque difference between the engines that it happened at very low speed, which might
have kept me from being killed, if it had happened when they were spinning very fast.

I always wondered after that what might have happened if I had been more conservative and
put a second 292 in the trunk! But I suspect my knowledge of gears at the time was not
sufficient even for that. So that car pretty much just sat after that until I eventually took the
rear engine back out.

But maybe that experience caused me to even think that a second engine might make sense,
many years later. By then, I had also seen in hot rod magazines where a few people had done
what I had tried to do, but far more successfully!

See below, where a variant of this now seems extremely interesting!

Additional notes:

V-8 versus in-line engines

People sometimes notice that many of the higher power automobiles have V-8 or V-6
engines, while nearly all large trucks have in-line engines. WHY is that? Well, for a
disappointing reason! Stylists!

Until the 1940s, automobiles were TALL! The HOOD had to be tall because the vertical
structure of inline engines required a lot of vertical space under the hood. But then stylists
started wanting to sell cars that were sleeker and lower. A V-8 engine has its cylinders at a
significant angle, which actually allows the engine to be designed with several inches less
overall height. The extra pistons were also popular in providing more power, but there had
been I-8 and even I-12 engines used earlier. An additional benefit for the stylists was that the
V-8 engine was SHORTER (front to back) than even an I-6, for additional flexibility
regarding styling.

There is no significant difference in overall efficiency between a V-8 and an I-6, and if they
have the same number of cylinders and same displacement, the performance is very, very
similar. STYLING was essentially the only real reason why V-8s took over for several
decades!

In trucks, which are DESIGNED to be tall, there is no benefit of trying to save a couple
vertical inches, so straight-line engines are nearly universal. The only other consideration is
that a V-8 engine has more moving parts, which will eventually wear out and fail. Since
trucks are intended to go as far as possible, another reason for considering an inline engine!

Exhaust sound

Even I see this as a peculiar subject for a Theoretical Physicist to feel needs describing! But
nearly any good gearhead can hear a small-block Chevy engine zoom by and KNOW which
specific engine is in that car. How is this possible? It is almsot entirely due to just two factors,
the camshaft in the engine and the exhaust system. With a street cam, the valves are not open
excessively long, which lets the engine start and run reliably. But that means that minimal
fuel-air mixture passes THROUGH the cylinder without getting burned there. That minimal
amount of fuel-air mixture gets into the very hot cast-iron exhaust header, where it gets
ignited, and there is MODERATE exhaust sound, which the muffler then pretty much
muffles! Now, with a more aggressive camshaft, the valves stay open longer, and that results
in both the processing of more gas-air mixture for greater power, but also more unburned gas-
air mixture getting past the cylinder. This all still ignites in the hot exhaust header, and so the
exhaust is always louder.

But then the design of the exhaust headers then comes into play. The cylinders fire in a
different sequence in different engines. This all results in four separate surges of such
unburned fuel-air mixture entering the exhaust manifold from four different cylinders.
FACTORY exhaust manifolds rarely considered any issues of interference of the surges
interfering with each other, and different manufacturers exhaust therefore sound differently.
The exhaust manifolds on the small block Chevy engines of the 1950s and 1960s were better
designed than the others, which both created a unique sound pattern and also greatly reduced
the needed power to force the exhaust out. You probably do NOT want to now get a more
technical explanation of this, which is VERY complex.

For highest performance engines, custom-designed exhaust headers are used. Not all of them
are designed really well, and some seem to have been designed to be decorative! And finally,
many dragstrip engines have SEPARATE exhaust headers for each cylinder, to completely
eliminate any possible pressure buildups that might use up some horsepower.

By the way, exhaust header design is SPEED DEPENDENT. Few of the designers seem to
know that! The well-designed headers are designed so that at red-line engine speed, each
pressure surge from a cylinder is able to clear before the next pressure surge arrives from a
different cylinder.

Flywheel

All internal combustion engines need to have a flywheel. The fact that the explosive forces
inside the cylinders are brief and irregular means that there is NOT a consistent torque acting
to turn the crankshaft. A heavy enough flywheel smooths out the irregularity. It also has
another effect which will be noted momentarily.

Early cars had VERY heavy flywheels. Whether hand-cranked or with electric starters, that
aided the starting of engines, as it permitted variations in how much gasoline had gotten into
each cylinder, by allowing ANY cylinder which fired to increase the spinning speed so that
the other cylinders could start behaving correctly.

Before around 1954, all cars had stick transmissions. That meant that when the clutch was
pushed in, the engine could run with no external load. A very heavy flywheel had the added
benefit of keeping the engine from blowing itself apart if the gas pedal was pushed all the
way to the floor with the clutch released. The flywheel's Rotational Inertia was designed to be
enough where the engine had to take many seconds of being floored without load, before the
engine might rev up above its redline speed. At that time, engines were underpowered and
also built like tanks, so they really rarely could rev up fast enough to do themselves damage
anyway. Manufacturers LIKE if their new vehicles do not self-destruct!

In the 1950s and 1960s, muscle cars started being manufactured. In general, the
manufacturers chose to install very heavy (thick) flywheels on their vehicles, such that the
public would not be likely to over-rev any of their vehicles and get bad Public Relations. But
they installed essentially identical but thinner flywheels in vehicles that were considered
high-performance. Why? No FUNCTIONAL reason, actually. The thinner flywheels allowed
the engines to run rougher, a disadvantage to the general public.

Finally getting to the point here! The thinner flywheel had less Rotational Inertia (I) which
meant that TORQUE created by an engine which had the clutch disengaged WOULD REV
UP FASTER! If a moderately noisy exhaust system/muffler like a glass-pack was used, the
SOUND of the engine revving up unexpectedly fast SOUNDS like the engine is really
powerful! It's quite an interesting change, and the sound effects are quite impressive!

Conveniently, both Ford and General Motors (and I assume Chrysler) used essentially
identical flywheels in nearly all their vehicles for many years. Back then, when friends would
bring their cars to me to improve them, they rarely had enough money to buy the big
carburetors and improved intake manifolds and exhaust headers and camshafts to
ACTUALLY make their cars hotter. I did not have to charge them too much to replace the
stock (thick) flywheel with an identical one that was from a performance car (i.e., thinner)
and also replace the stock muffler with a glasspack. When they would first sit in their car and
rev it up, they were always amazed that it was still their car! Their IMPRESSION was that it
sounded far more powerful! The glasspack muffler was so that when they were driving (in
other words, the clutch was engaged and the engine was loaded), the fact that the engine was
actually no more powerful would not be obvious, the louder exhaust distracting their
attention.

Now, there IS a down-side to using a thinner flywheel, which I discovered one day back then.
A VERY cute girl kept insisting on sitting in my (severely modified) car. She talked me into
letting her start the engine, with the car inside my garage. I had installed a VERY heavy duty
clutch, and I was pretty sure that she could never have pushed it down to do any shifting, so
the car was not going to go anywhere. But the crazy girl pushed the gas pedal to the floor and
kept it there! With the lighter flywheel and very powerful engine, it revved up very fast to
speeds which seemed likely to destroy itself. Fortunately, I was sitting right there and I
grabbed the ignition key and turned it off, which was certainly the only reason I did not have
lots of expensive engine parts all over the garage! I never again allowed any girl to start the
engine of any of my hotter cars!

Flame Speed Propagation

Another way of describing that flame speed characteristic is to say that the pressure increases
within the combustion chamber at a certain rate, such as of about 20 PSI/degree of crankshaft
rotation (for the average operating circumstances we have been considering). During the
approximate 18° of crankshaft rotation we have been considering (starting with advanced
spark ignition), the pressure rises around 360 PSIA, from the original 120 PSIA compression
pressure up to around the 500 PSIA (485 PSIG) we have been discussing. All the other
calculations are the same as above. Again, because of many complexities in the details of
how the flame-front progresses and affects the remaining gas-air mixture, a constant value of
such a number is not precisely accurate. Even the flame-front speed is not constant during the
combustion process because, as the local temperature and pressure increases due to the shock
wave of the mixture that already burned, the flame-front speed rises. Therefore, the very late
stages of the combustion process occur more rapidly that we have suggested here. However,
it permits basic calculations and analysis. It also presents a way of seeing how and why the
pressure and force are greater during the later stages of the combustion process.

The actual thorough presentation of the mathematics follows the logic and the examples
above. There are some additional complications. (1) The actual angle between the connecting
rod and the tangent to the crankshaft throw is always slightly larger (better) than in the
simplified geometry presented above. See Section 3 in Mark's Standard Handbook for
Mechanical Engineers for a good example of the geometrical considerations and the force
diagrams. (2) A lot of characteristics are constantly changing. A reasonably accurate analysis
should probably include calculations like those above for every degree of crankshaft rotation,
considering the instantaneous volume of the combustion chamber and the instantaneous
pressure due to the explosion, as well as the angle of the connecting rod and that of the
crankshaft throw. The instantaneous torque transferred to the crankshaft would then be
known for every degree of rotation. A numerical Integration could then determine the average
(practical) torque that is developed. (3) Exhaust valves begin opening even while the power
cycle is still proceeding, such that they will be adequately open when the exhaust (upward)
stroke begins. A tradeoff in engine design is that the old waste gases must be removed, and
then the entire combustion chamber filled with new fresh gas-air mixture from the intake
valves, all in very small fractions of a second. It is an imperfect arrangement. Some exhaust
gases always remain in the cylinder, keeping some fresh gas-air mixture from ever being able
to enter. In both cases, the valves are always slightly open during the early stages of
compression (intake valves) and the late stages of power (exhaust valves). All of these
considerations act to reduce the actual amount of power that can be developed in a real
engine.

This practical (average) torque is also lower than the maximum numbers presented here. In a
V-8 4-cycle engine, each piston is responsible for developing torque over a 90° range of
crankshaft rotation, before the next piston can take over. We have generally been discussing
maximum instantaneous torque for specific crankshaft positions. It should be clear that the
measured torque of any engine will be less, because it represents the average of torque
developed during that entire 90° of crankshaft rotation, because no other cylinder is yet
firing.

The crankshaft angle torque curves vary greatly in shape for different engine speeds, being
very narrow at low engine speeds and rather broad and fairly constant at high engine speeds.
The very narrow angle range of productive power for an engine at idle combines with the
earlier mentioned geometrical disadvantage to fully explain why automotive engines can stall
at low idle speeds.

Hydrogen as a Potential Fuel in Internal Combustion

Engines
On first thought, Hydrogen SEEMS to be an ideal fuel for vehicles. It burns with the only
resulting product being water vapor, so it comes across as infinitely Green! Billions of dollars
in research is being done to try to develop a so-called Hydrogen economy for the (distant)
future. Sadly, it is nearly inconceivable that it could ever actually happen, except in
impressive test-car demos!
Hydrogen has all sorts of DISADVANTAGES regarding being a motor fuel. Primarily, it
DOES NOT EXIST NATURALLY and must be produced, by any of several processes that
are all extremely expensive and high-tech to actually do on any decent scale. But it happens
to have another disadvantage which relates to the subject of this presentation.

Hydrogen CANNOT simply be MIXED with gasoline as a lot of people now seem to claim
and think! GASEOUS hydrogen would simply create BUBBLES in the gasoline, and even if
that is taken care of, it provides NO actual power boost benefits at all!

Flame Front Speed

Even if all the other hurdles are overcome regarding using Hydrogen as a fuel, it seems to
have yet another disadvantage, one that it shares with most other gaseous fuels: the speed at
which a flame front travels is rather slow for the purposes of conventional engines. With an
ideal Hydrogen-air mixture, a flame front can travel at around 8 feet/second. Mark's Standard
Handbook for Mechanical Engineers, Section 7, Gaseous Fuels, graph For comparison, a
gasoline-air mixture (compressed) creates a flame front speed that ranges from around 70
feet/second up to around 170 feet/second in normal engines. Mark's Standard Handbook for
Mechanical Engineers, Section 9, Internal Combustion Engines, Flame Speed.

(NOTE: There does not appear to be available any data regarding flame-front speed for
Hydrogen gas when compressed as in a car engine. Therefore, we add the following
discussion, which also shows the sort of far more comprehensive Physics research that is the
basis for essentially all the statements made in this presentation.)

First, everyone is taught in school that Hydrogen "simply" combines with Oxygen in the familiar (2) H 2 + O 2 ↔ (2) H 2 O. That turns
out to be an enormous simplification! There are actually 19 different reactions that can and do happen! Each releases different
amounts of energy (with two of them even REQUIRING energy to occur!). In general, two or more of these reactions occur in rapid
succession, with the end result being the familiar reaction. Physicists and Chemists analyze ALL of those 19 unique reactions, in
order to better understand exactly what is going on and why. In fact, the overall reaction of Hydrogen with Oxygen can occur in two
VERY different ways! The DESIRED one is by burning (conflagration) which has the flame-front speed indicated, around 8
feet/second in the atmosphere. The UNDESIRED one is by explosion (detonation) which has a flame-front speed of 2,821
meters/second or 9,255 feet/second! That is around EIGHT TIMES the speed of sound and many times faster than the fastest rifle
bullet travels! It is incredibly dangerous when Hydrogen decides to detonate, and science does not yet have a very complete
understanding of why it sometimes does! Our discussion will be about the DESIRED laminar flame-front process.

Next, the velocity of the (laminar) flame-front is known to be very dependent on many different variables. Here is an equation that
gives the flame-front velocity (speed):

(There are actually three different theories which exist to explain the motion of flame-front travel and this equation happens to be
from the one that seems to be the best. Many of the equations involved are far more complex than this one. They were generally
developed during the 1980s.)

If a number of reasonable assumptions are made, this can be greatly simplified into:

The exponents are different for each type of fuel gas, and for Hydrogen they have been experimentally determined (Milton and Keck
1984) to be α is 1.26 and β is 0.26

Note that all of this is based on ideal conditions; the perfect proportion of fuel and oxygen; perfect mixing; etc, and that real
conditions are often not ideal.

If we assume that an engine has an (actual) compression ratio of 8:1, the pressure increase factor therefore would be 80.26 which is
1.717. The natural flame-front speed of 8 feet/second would therefore increase to 8 * 1.717 or 13.7 feet/second. We note that some
2004 research in Bergen, Norway shows a maximum atmospheric flame-front speed for Hydrogen as 2.8 meters/second, which is
slightly higher than the 8 ft/sec cited above at 9.2 ft/second.

This is still far slower than the measured flame-front speeds inside gasoline-fired internal combustion engines (which is generally at
least 90 feet/second during most driving). However, the dependence on temperature causes some improvement in this situation.
Hydrogen burns at 2,755°C or 4,991°F. The heating of the gas occurs gradually during the process of the combustion, but if we
assumed that the hydrogen got up to that temperature, the temperature dependence factor in the equation above would be around 18
to one. This implies that the COMBINATION of the higher pressure and the higher temperature MIGHT cause a flame-front speed
which is comparable to that known to be in gasoline-fired internal combustion engines. But it does not appear that anyone has yet
actually done such experiments to validate that statement.

If you have been following this reasoning, you now also know WHY engines NEED to have
a COMPRESSION RATIO! Simply burning gasoline at atmospheric pressure would have far
too slow of a flame front speed to be of any use in an engine! You never knew WHY before,
did you? Now you do! It also indicates WHY compression ratios of 2:1 or 3:1 are never seen
in engines.

Consider the inside of an engine cylinder in a normal car engine traveling down the highway.
The engine may be rotating at 2,000 rpm, or 33 revolutions per second. The piston must
therefore move upward and downward 33 times every second, and its (maximum) speed in
the middle of its stroke is around 45 feet/second. If a fuel burning in the cylinder is to
actually push down on the piston, in order to do actual work in propelling the vehicle, the
fuel-air mixture needs to burn at a speed FASTER than the piston is moving! Otherwise, the
slow-burning mixture would actually act to SLOW DOWN the piston! It would not only not
do productive work, but it would require work FROM the piston.

The ACTUAL hydrogen flame-front speed inside an ICE might be sufficient for conventional
burning as in current ICE engines, but someone needs to do the experiments to confirm that!
But it suggests that yet another hurdle might lie in front of Hydrogen ever becoming a
common motor fuel.

By the way, the INTENDED usage of Hydrogen in vehicles is quite different from this! The
much-publicized Fuel Cell is a device which converts the energy in a fuel like Hydrogen
DIRECTLY INTO ELECTRICITY. THERE IS NO BURNING INVOLVED! The premise
for future vehicles is that they might use Fuel Cells to provide electricity for electric motor
drive systems. Which means that Mortuary Services may be appropriate for the Internal
Combustion Engine! But it may be another ten or twenty years before fuel-cell technology
has developed to the point of that becoming realistic.

As an additional note here, when you see impressive demos on TV or in a video regarding
Hydrogen being used as a fuel for a vehicle, try to check to see the source of that Hydrogen!
In general, such demos use LIQUID Hydrogen (which is necessarily refrigerated to
incredibly cold temperature, within a few degrees of Absolute Zero!) LIQUID Hydrogen
does not have the problem of the huge volume of Hydrogen as a gas (where one pound takes
up around 200 cubic feet) (one pound of liquid hydrogen takes up less than 1/4 cubic foot,
almost 1,000 times smaller). Where we have discussed that one cubic foot of Hydrogen gas
only contains around 360 Btus of chemical energy, one cubic foot of Liquid Hydrogen
contains around 300,000 Btus of chemical energy in it, relatively comparable to the energy
concentration of gasoline (about one-third of it). So, for demonstration purposes, a fairly
small amount of LIQUID Hydrogen contains spectacular amounts of energy in it! Which then
gives impressive performance by the demo vehicle. However, IF they used LIQUID
Hydrogen, that (small) amount for the demo quite possibly cost them tens of thousands of
dollars to buy!

But you might notice that even Liquid Hydrogen only actually contains around 1/3 of the
chemical energy in it that gasoline does! A cubic foot of gasoline contains around 7.5 gallons,
each of which contains around 126,000 Btus of chemical energy, for a total of around
945,000 Btus. The cubic foot of Liquid Hydrogen contains around 300,000 Btus. And as we
noted, a cubic foot of gaseous Hydrogen only contains around 360 Btus. Another indication
of WHY gasoline has been so popular - it is a very compact form of a lot of chemical energy!
And also an indication that ALL the outrageous claims that people now make regarding
Hydrogen (or variants of it) allegedly making enormous power, are simply deceptions.

OK. Finally, there are all kinds of hucksters who are trying to sell all manner of products that
they claim will give you tremendous improvements in the gas mileage of your vehicle by
somehow injecting Hydrogen into the engine. This is really sad regarding how deceptive their
presentations are. Again, if you would inject LIQUID hydrogen into any engine, you COULD
add a large amount of additional CHEMICAL ENERGY into the engine to be burned.
However, what they try to sell are tiny devices which they claim are hydrogen generators.
You should realize from this presentation that even if you could generate a cubic foot of
hydrogen each minute (which is extremely difficult to do AND would require many
horsepower from the engine to generate the needed electricity to do it), that would only be
adding around 360 Btus of chemical energy in the hydrogen into the engine (remembering
that a gallon of gasoline contains 126,000 Btus of chemical energy in it). A demo where
LIQUID hydrogen was injected COULD show measurable improvement, but any device that
tries to generate GASEOUS hydrogen to be injected is simply an expensive joke!

An Interesting Situation!
Racing teams spend millions of dollars to try to gain a fraction of an mph speed over the
competition. I was not intending to, but I have come across an absolutely effective method to
gain VERY large increases in vehicle speed for Indy, Formula, and Formula II and certain
other racing vehicles. The vehicle would have to be completely built from scratch, but an
Indy car would CERTAINLY gain at least 13 mph in average speed. IF I disclosed this
concept to any Racing Team, within three minutes I could get them to realize that I am right
and even WHY I am right! In that three minutes, they would fully see why they could gain
the 13 mph (and actually probably somewhat more!) So, here is an interesting situation!
Given that all racing teams spend millions of dollars in the attempt to gain 0.5 mph average
speed, what would they think it might be worth to have at least a 13 mph speed advantage
over all competition (at least until they also learned the concept!)?

By the way, even though there are countless restrictions and rules controlling racing vehicles,
no such rule is violated or even challenged by this concept.
They obviously would never offer me "millions of dollars" without knowing what it was for,
but once they heard those three minutes, they would likely see that they then would no longer
need me! From THEIR point-of-view, they would see it reasonable to say to me "Hey,
Polack, here's a hundred bucks for your idea." Well, I may be Polish, but virtually no one has
ever thought that I was stupid! At least THAT stupid!

I don't really see any obvious way to resolve this, except that maybe a few hundred thousand
could be put in Escrow (prior to hearing the brief description) and with some "performance
payment" which would also then be paid to me (per mph increase, for example).

Sadly, it is a similar situation to where I have been seriously taken advantage of in the past
and which I am currently feeling it necessary to be cautious about regarding several current
inventions in other subjects. And I really see no logical way that I could feel safe regarding
disclosing all the important information about! So it strikes me as simply an Interesting
Situation!

Research
I have done extensive research and design work regarding the hypothetical engine concept
mentioned somewhat above. In October 2002, I actually discovered a way where I could
accomplish essentially what was discussed up there, including later building a small
prototype engine. I cobbled that strange engine together out of mostly standard lawnmower
engine parts (with a few very peculiar parts!) I definitely got carried away with testing it (in
June 2004) as I saw the horsepower and torque output keep increasing. Given that a standard
Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engine is rated at 3.5 HP (at 3600 rpm), I became quite
excited when my strange engine was producing well over 12 HP at that engine speed. For
reasons that can only be attributed to enthusiasm, I wound it out higher! At approximately
6300 rpm, it was briefly producing just over 43 HP, when the mechanical strength of the
generic lawnmower engine parts showed that they could not survive. There was a massive
disintegration, and it was quite fortunate that I happened to be standing in a place where I was
not injured (or killed).

It represents a very unusual engine, which may not be very compatible with modern
automotive manufacturing technology.

However, I later (late 2004) came up with a rather different concept of the same basic
invention, which probably has massive application. It involves a retrofit modification of a
conventional V-8 engine. Relatively few different parts are needed, generally using most of
the original engine parts, including the block, heads, oil pump, water pump and all
accessories. The heads need to have some machining done to them, and a different (and very
strange) crankshaft and camshaft are needed, along with different connecting rods. It does
NOT seem compatible with I-block or V-6 engines.

I am not interested in assisting giant corporations to make additional billions in profits;

however I would be quite interested in advancing a retro-fit system and am open to the
possibility of a mutual business effort regarding manufacturing and providing suitable kits.

The resulting (small block Chevy) is an engine that idles at around 60 rpm (instead of 600
rpm) so that it uses only 1/10 the fuel at stop signs and in rush hour traffic. It has greater
torque output, on the order of 500 lb-ft, compared to the common 200 lb-ft that many V-8
engines produce. Also, where conventional engines produce that maximum torque only at
around 1800 rpm, this engine had a relatively flat torque curve, even generating close to that
500 lb-ft near the 60 rpm idle speed! (Which is partly why it is able to idle at such a slow
[actual slower than heartbeat-rate] speed.) The result of all these differences are that this
engine has better gas mileage (by over 50% improvement) while also having acceleration
performance that massively out-performs any conventional engine.

The specific levels of these improvements depend on some features of any specific engine
design and construction. These figures are based on what is called the small-block Chevy
(327 or 350 cid) engine.

I am NOT sure that the concept is compatible with V-6 engines, and I doubt that it is
compatible with any four cylinder engines. The fact that V-8s have pretty much become
dinosaurs may mean that this concept would have no possible future.

I do not intend to be providing Engineering assistance to individual people who only want to
win trophies at a drag strip! Someone would have to convince me that there was a credible
possibility that this improvement might actually advance to the stage of becoming a retro-fit
kit, with credible marketing arrangements for millions of drivers to benefit from it.

This same general theme has resulted in yet another variant! In June 2009, I discovered a way
to make an engine which is extremely different than either of the above, but which has the
capability of even better performance and fuel economy, as well as several other surprising
benefits. If this one works as calculated, it might represent an enormous advance in
automotive design. I am currently working toward getting a prototype built.

An Entirely Different Approach to a Hybrid!

I am NOT a fan of so-called Hybrid cars, as I see the potential advantages to be minimal, far
smaller than the public is generally told. However, there is a concept that I gradually came up
with that is technically a Hybrid vehicle. The generic Oldsmobile that I had started modifying
was to keep the good gas mileage of its moderate-sized engine, and would have still
LOOKED like the original car, but it was intended to be able to accelerate at a rate that
dragsters would be proud of, using around 840 horsepower for extremely impressive hole-
shots at traffic lights!

I would be willing to help Detroit or Toyota or someone else to build this practical vehicle
and probably economically priced vehicle, which has some vague similarities to some parts
of the Tesla electric sports car!

Long ago, I realized that NO driver ever actually USES the huge horsepower of the over-
powered cars that are sold, EXCEPT for a maximum of less than 30 seconds at a time. In all
the time I have owned my Corvettes, and an Austin-Healey 3000 and other sports cars, there
has NEVER been any time where I had my foot to the floor for more than 15 seconds, and
that was during a quarter-mile drag where the vehicle went from zero to around 120 mph in
around 13 seconds. So it occurred to me that it really is foolish for people to buy cars that
have giant engines that are advertised as 470 horsepower or 505 horsepower! At all times
other than those few seconds, the driver has to be paying for gasoline that is being burned for
the CAPABILITY of that power and acceleration.

In an entire year of owning and driving a Corvette, I doubt that there are more than a twenty
times when I really use massive power for more than maybe three seconds at a time. I
realized that meant that I actually USED all the power that Corvettes are known for, for
maybe ONE MINUTE TOTAL per year!

I had started assembling an experimental vehicle, based on a 1985 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera
3.0 liter V6 front-wheel drive car I then had. (It was later vandalized beyond possible repair,
so I have not yet again pursued the project with any other car [yet]). The car was mid-sized,
capable of holding five or six people, a pretty standard vehicle. Its moderate-sized engine
permitted tolerable acceleration but never anything really interesting (to a Corvette owner!)

I noticed that the rear wheels (of the front-wheel-drive car) really did not do anything other
than support the rear of the car!

I also knew that even a STANDARD car battery can contain around 80 ampere-hours of
electric power in it, which, at 12 volts, is about 1 kWh (80 * 12 Wh, as discussed above).
That meant that the one standard battery could provide about 1.5 horsepower for an hour, but
that also meant that it contained enough power to provide 1.5 * 60 or 90 horsepower for one
minute, or 180 horsepower for 30 seconds, or 360 horsepower for 15 seconds! (A deep-
discharge battery has even more energy capacity.)

So my experiment was/is to be a car like the generic Cutlass Ciera, with its standard 120 hp
engine, but where EACH of the rear wheels was replaced by an electric-motor-driven wheel,
driven directly from TWO(*) batteries in series. (Total, two motors, resembling car starter
motors, and four standard car batteries in the trunk, a rather minimal added expense beyond
the modest cost of the standard Cutlass Ciera!

Maybe it would represent adding $1,000 to the cost of NEARLY ANY front-wheel-drive car.
And what would be the result?

In the process of turning the engine to start a vehicle, it can briefly draw around 500 amperes
of electricity from a (single) battery. At around 10 volts, that is around 5,000 watts. Since
each horsepower is equal to 746 watts, a normal starter has the capability of producing
around 7 horsepower or so (ball park, each Make and Model and engine size is different, and
with modern vehicles with tiny motors, they need less horsepower during starting so most
MODERN starters have less capability.

Just adding 7 (times two) horsepower would not be worth the trouble. But starter motors are
designed to be durable enough to reliably start the vehicle for many years. So long ago,
people learned that in order to start engines that had really exotic camshafts, a standard starter
and battery just didn't cut it, it didn't turn the engine fast enough to start. So what was their
solution? You guessed it! They used the SAME starter motor, but ran it on 24 volts instead of
12! Two batteries in series! In Electrical Engineering, a standard formula is that the POWER
is proportional to the SQUARE of the voltage, if all other variables are kept the same. Instead
of the starter producing around 7 horsepower to start the exotic engine, it produces around 28
horsepower. So at dragstrips, you often hear starter motors which sound like dentist's drills
because they are spinning so fast. BUT AN IMPORTANT FACT IS THAT THEY STILL
LAST FOR A DECENT TIME!.

My experiment was to use that (conservative) arrangement in the Ciera, four batteries. The
experiment would therefore be expected to add around 56 horsepower (28 * 2) extra to the
120 horsepower of the conventional engine. Not spectacular, but the total of 176 horsepower
would actually have greater benefit than that, because the 120 horsepower RATING of the
standard engine actually got far less horsepower to the wheels! So I figured that my rather
economical experiment should provide GREATER THAN 50% faster acceleration, likely
close to double the acceleration. Given that using 24-volts to power race car starters has long
shown that the starter survives pretty well, I consider that a very conservative experiment!

Of course, the next step would be to try THREE batteries for each of the starter motors. I am
not aware of anyone who has done that before, so it is not clear how long the starter could
operate before becoming toast. However, the simple fact that it is NEVER intended to be
powered for more than 3 to 10 seconds at a time, figures to allow the starter windings plenty
of time to cool back down!

In any case, using three batteries for each starter motor should produce as much as 7 * 32 or
63 horsepower at each rear wheel, or 126 additional horsepower. I am suspecting that an
innocent looking Cutlass Ciera with a putt-putt engine should have impressive acceleration
with 126 additional horsepower!

And of course, my sugar plum dreams would require at least TRYING four batteries for each!
That would be 7 * 42 or 112 horsepower at each rear wheel, or 224 additional horsepower.
Now keep in mind that these experiments would all use GENERIC STARTER MOTORS,
and that the recent Tesla sports car uses a very exotic (and very expensive) motor and battery
pack that has proven that even greater power could be had. Imagine if EACH of the rear
wheels could provide 360 horsepower for 15 seconds, then that vehicle should have
acceleration that would be beyond belief!

I intended to put an activating switch under the gas pedal, where when I would floor it, the
Ciera engine might be producing its 120 hp, PLUS the horsepower from EACH rear wheel,
or a total of a lot of horsepower (but for only 15 seconds max!)

Under all NORMAL driving, the Ciera would get the excellent gas mileage that its small
engine could provide, and that engine could probably be even smaller, a four-cylinder
instead. But for those few seconds when acceleration was desired, it could be spectacular!

Note that this vehicle was essentially ALREADY approved by the government safety testing
and all the rest, so it would immediately be street-legal. The tire-grip might not permit it, but
0-60 in less than 3 seconds seems possible! FAR faster than ANY car on any road today!

And all from only maybe a $1,000 increase in the cost of the vehicle! Or the sky's the limit on
cost for creative variants!

The giant vehicle manufacturers all design and build either under-powered tiny vehicles that
get great gas mileage or they design and build vehicles with hyper-performing high-
horsepower engines that perform great but which have lousy gas mileage. The approach I
have described above is better than both, in that it combines the best of both general designs!
And at a vehicle price that would not be much above their current under-powered offerings!

I guess that what I have described here is a sort of Hybrid vehicle, since the gasoline engine
would drive several alternators that would recharge the batteries after a performance show.
But it entirely different from what the vehicle manufacturers think is a Hybrid!

However, in my intent of modifying my Ciera, I was aware of two problems that seemed
possibly hard to overcome. I knew that standard car starter motors only generate around 7
horsepower, where I wanted much more. The other problem is a result of that, in that a
standard car battery is designed to have the energy drain rate of the standard starter.

I considered re-wiring a standard starter to have fewer windings of heavier wires, so that it
drew a lot more current, and therefore generated more power. However, with my target of
hundreds of horsepower, I was not really sure whether my modification of a starter motor
would cut it! So I was quite excited when the Tesla came along and it has a single electric
motor which they rate at 180 horsepower! And equally, their battery-pack is clearly capable
of supplying the electricity very rapidly for such horsepower. So the Tesla apparently has the
resolutions to BOTH of the issues that had concerned me! And where the Tesla needs to be
able to withstand that level of energy flow continuously, all I would need would be a max of
about 15 seconds worth. I suspect that would mean that less-expensive batteries might be
sufficient and the motor could be designed to have an operating lifetime comparable to car
starters, measured in minutes!

In any case, I believe my approach makes a lot more sense than what any of the giant vehicle
manufacturers are now selling or designing, primarily since it can allow "nearly stock"
vehicles, for both government safety approvals and for vehicle pricing that the public might
be able to afford.

In a "don't do this at home" theme, there IS a possible safety issue. Say that one of the motors
burned out or didn't start and the other one worked. Then ONE rear wheel would be
producing a lot of torque and power, which seems likely to cause the vehicle to instantly go
out of control. A bad deal! A related issue could be related to whip-lash injuries for occupants
when all that extra power suddenly kicked in. If you have been in any high performance
vehicle during a serious hole-shot, you know how you are thrown back into the seat! So this
sort of concept would need a good deal of safety testing to make sure that unexpected things
did not suddenly occur.

Footnotes
.

Theoretical Mileage of a Sedan Car

Calculated at 60 mph constant highway speed.
These are ball-park numbers used to simply show you how this all works. You could
probably obtain the frontal area of your vehicle and the drag coefficient of it from the vehicle
manufacturer.

We learned before that the Dynamic Pressure is related to the Momentum in the air and is
simply the product of the mass-flow of the air times the speed. In the examples here, the one
square foot cross-sectional area is air's density times volume (1/415 slug/cu ft * 88 f/s) times
the velocity in feet per second (88 f/s) which is 18.6 pounds of Dynamic Pressure force.

A Large Sedan might have a frontal area of 22 square feet and a drag coefficient of around
0.43. Therefore, we would have an Aerodynamic Drag of 18.6 * 22 * 0.43 or 176 pounds.
The Tire Drag for that vehicle weight would be about 45 pounds so the total Drag is about
220 pounds.

This drag is multiplied by the velocity (88) to get 19,500 ft-lb/second used to move the
vehicle. We can convert this into horsepower (35.4) or watts ( 26,400 ) or Btus/hr ( 90,000 ).
We know that a gallon of gasoline contains around 126,000 Btus of chemical energy in it, but
also that automotive engines and equipment are not particularly efficient at around 21%,
meaning that we then only get to use 26,500 Btus of that energy to move the vehicle.

So if we start with one gallon (26,500 Btus of available energy, and we know that we would
need 90,000 Btus to drive an entire hour, we can see that our vehicle would travel 26.5/90 of
that hour before running out of gasoline! This is just under 18 minutes, and since we are
going 60 mph, we are going one mile per minute, and so we know that the car we just
described would get around 18 mpg mileage. It ain't that complicated!

Theoretical Mileage of a Compact Car

Calculated at 60 mph constant highway speed.

These are ball-park numbers used to simply show you how this all works. You could
probably obtain the frontal area of your vehicle and the drag coefficient of it from the vehicle
manufacturer.

We learned before that the Dynamic Pressure is related to the Momentum in the air and is
simply the product of the mass-flow of the air times the speed. In the examples here, the one
square foot cross-sectional area is density times volume (1/415 slug/cu ft * 88 f/s) times the
velocity in feet per second (88 f/s) which is 18.6 pounds of Dynamic Pressure force.
A Compact might have a frontal area of 17 square feet and a drag coefficient of around 0.40.
Therefore, we would have an Aerodynamic Drag of 18.6 * 17 * 0.4 or 125 pounds. The Tire
Drag for that vehicle weight would be about 30 pounds so the total Drag is about 155 pounds.

This drag is multiplied by the velocity (88) to get 13,500 ft-lb/second used to move the
vehicle. We can convert this into horsepower (24.8) or watts ( 18,500 ) or Btus/hr ( 63,000 ).
We know that a gallon of gasoline contains around 126,000 Btus of chemical energy in it, but
also that automotive engines and equipment are not particularly efficient at around 21%,
meaning that we then only get to use 26,500 Btus of that energy to move the vehicle.

So if we start with one gallon (26,500 Btus of available energy, and we know that we would
need 63,000 Btus to drive an entire hour, we can see that our vehicle would travel 26.5/63 of
that hour before running out of gasoline! This is just under 25 minutes, and since we are
going 60 mph, we are going one mile per minute, and so we know that the car we just
described would get around 25 mpg mileage.

Theoretical Mileage of a Motorcycle

Calculated at 60 mph constant highway speed.

We learned before that the Dynamic Pressure is related to the Momentum in the air and is
simply the product of the mass-flow of the air times the speed. In the examples here, the one
square foot cross-sectional area is density times volume (1/415 slug/cu ft * 88 f/s) times the
velocity in feet per second (88 f/s) which is 18.6 pounds of Dynamic Pressure force.

A medium-sized motorcycle might have a frontal area of 7 square feet and a drag coefficient
of around 0.4. Therefore, we would have an Aerodynamic Drag of 18.6 * 7 * 0.4 or 52
pounds. The Tire Drag for that vehicle weight would be about 5 pounds so the total Drag is
about 57 pounds.

This drag is multiplied by the velocity (88) to get 5,000 ft-lb/second used to move the
vehicle. We can convert this into horsepower (9.2) or watts ( 6,800 ) or Btus/hr ( 23,000 ).
We know that a gallon of gasoline contains around 126,000 Btus of chemical energy in it, but
also that automotive engines and equipment are not particularly efficient at around 21%,
meaning that we then only get to use 26,500 Btus of that energy to move the vehicle.

So if we start with one gallon (26,500 Btus of available energy, and we know that we would
need 23,000 Btus to drive an entire hour, we can see that our vehicle would travel 26.5/23 of
that hour before running out of gasoline! This is just under 70 minutes, and since we are
going 60 mph, we are going one mile per minute, and so we know that the car we just
described would get around 70 mpg mileage.

Tricky Theoretical Mileage of a Car

Calculated at THREE mph constant speed.

We learned before that the Dynamic Pressure is related to the Momentum in the air and is
simply the product of the mass-flow of the air times the speed. In the examples here, the one
square foot cross-sectional area is density times volume (1/415 slug/cu ft * 4.4 f/s) times the
velocity in feet per second (4.4 f/s) which is 0.0465 pound of Dynamic Pressure force.

Let's again consider that gas-guzzler big sedan. We just said that a Large Sedan might have a
frontal area of 22 square feet and a drag coefficient of around 0.43. Therefore, we would have
an Aerodynamic Drag of 0.0465 * 22 * 0.43 or 0.44 pound. The Tire Drag for that vehicle
weight would normally be about 45 pounds but in the spirit of deception, we might fill them
to 90 PSI, without bothering to tell anyone that we did that! This effect and the very low
speed would mean the tire sidewalls would hardly heat up at all from flexing, and the Tire
Drag might be as low as 5 pounds. The total Drag (under these strange conditions) is
therefore about 5.4 pounds.

This drag is multiplied by the velocity (4.4) to get 24 ft-lb/second used to move the vehicle.
We can convert this into horsepower (0.04) or watts ( 32 ) or Btus/hr ( 110 ). We know that a
gallon of gasoline contains around 126,000 Btus of chemical energy in it, but also that
automotive engines and equipment are not particularly efficient at around 21%, meaning that
we then only get to use 26,500 Btus of that energy to move the vehicle.

So if we start with one gallon (26,500 Btus of available energy, and we know that we would
need 110 Btus to drive an entire hour, we can see that our vehicle would travel 26.5/0.11
hours before running out of gasoline! This is about 240 hours! Since we are going 3 mph, so
we know that the big sedan car we just described would EXPERIMENTALLY
DEMONSTRATE around 720 mpg mileage! In fact, if some advertiser thought it would
cause some cars to be sold, they would certainly do such a ridiculous test, just to be able to
keep themselves from being sued for claiming 720 miles per gallon! There actually were a
variety of companies that did such things, in massively twisting the conditions to make their
product look astoundingly good, but the government and the marketplace gradually caused
them to fade.

It actually turns out that the Drag Coefficient is probably even lower than the tiny amount we
calculated above, because all the airflows would be laminar rather than turbulent. So the
gasoline in this silly test might last even LONGER than just 10 constant days of driving at 3
MPH! And if the tire pressures were increased even more, 1,000 miles-per-gallon might be a
claim that could be made without being sued! Scary, huh?

But you may see the point in this silly discussion. Say that I was disreputable and I wanted
you to buy "magic roses" which must be placed on top of the engine in your car, and I wanted
to be able to put ads on TV that said that you would get 720 miles per gallon. A LOT of
people would buy such things! Snake oil is what it used to be called! But see that such a
disreputable operation could actually DO an incredibly slow speed test run, which could be
documented by Observers to have been done, and they could then never get sued for those
outrageous claims!