Post by Fire21 on Oct 10, 2021 12:06:11 GMT -5
I was laying in bed last night and got to thinking about what goes on inside an engine.
If an engine is idling at 600 rpm, the pistons in there are going up and down 10 times per second! (600 rpm divided by 60 seconds = 10 round trips for a piston)
At a highway speed of, say, 3000 rpm, that's 50 times per second that those pistons are going up and down!!! And the valves are opening and slamming shut 25 times per second!!! No wonder some of them break now and then!!
Now, at an unusual 6000 rpm, those crankshaft parts are flying at 100 times per second. Oh my gosh!! Valves are up to 50 times per second.
Looking at NASCAR racing speed of 9000, pistons and rods are at 150 times per second and valves are doing 75 motions per second. What keeps them together?
Indycar engines turn upward of 12,000 rpm, and some small engine in motorcycles are 15,000 and more!!!!!!!! Unfathomable!
Engineers tell us the combustion of fuel inside those cylinders is "controlled burning". In a 4-cycle engine there is a combustion in each cylinder every 2 revolutions, so they are firing at the same rate as the valves are moving...half the speed of the engine. Still, 75 "controlled burns" per second at 9000 rpm amounts to, in anyone's estimation, a bunch of explosions! Heck, even 10 per second is explosions!!
And that's in each individual cylinder. A Na$car V-8 at 9000 rpm sees a total of 600 of those "combustions" per second. (75 explosions x 8 cylinders = 600)
I know I've referred before to the violence that goes on inside engines. The above is pretty descriptive of that!
The engineering of those engines, and of the automobile overall, is simply astounding. I shake my head in wonder!!