Gasoline was originally considered dangerous and was discarded and destroyed at early refineries, which were manufacturing kerosene for lamps. As the gasoline engine developed, gasoline and the engine were harmonized to attain the best possible matching of characteristics. The most important properties of gasoline are its volatility and antiknock quality. Volatility is a measure of the ease of vaporization of gasoline, which is adjusted in the production process to account for seasonal and altitude variations in the local market. Properly formulated gasoline helps engines to start in cold weather and to avoid vapour lock in hot weather.
To suit the needs of a modern engine, a gasoline must have the volatility for which the fuel system of the engine was designed and an antiknock quality sufficient to avoid knock under normal operation. Although other specifications must also be met, volatility and knock rating are the most important. The size and structural arrangement of the molecules principally determine the knocking tendency of a gasoline as well as its volatility.
Tetraethyl lead, added to gasolines for many years to improve antiknock fueling, has been found to contaminate the exhaust gases with poisonous lead oxides, and so the practice has ended. Lower compression ratios and improved combustion-chamber designs have eliminated the need for extremely high-antiknock gasolines.
Lubricating oil is added to gasoline used in crankcase-compression two-stroke-cycle engines.
Performance
The performance of an engine is expressed in terms of power, speed, and fuel economy. The three quantities are evaluated with a dynamometer, a laboratory device that applies a controllable load in the form of resistance to the turning of the crankshaft and also measures the torque exerted at the shaft coupling. The resistance imposed by a dynamometer may be adjusted so that the desired engine speed is established at any throttle position. It is thus possible to run the engine at various speeds throughout its operating range, to continuously maintain these operating conditions, and to measure the precise load and speed at which each run is made. Additional test equipment permits measurement of the exact quantity of fuel consumed, as well as the duration of the runs. From these data the power-speed-economy relationships can be calculated and performance plotted.
The power produced by an engine is expressed in horsepower. When the power developed is measured by means of a dynamometer or similar braking device, it is called brake horsepower. This is the power actually delivered by the engine and is therefore the capacity of the engine. The power developed in the combustion chambers of the engine is greater than the delivered power because of friction and other mechanical losses. This power loss, called the friction horsepower, can be evaluated by “motoring” the engine (driving it in a forward direction) with a suitable dynamometer when no fuel is being burned. The power developed in the cylinder can then be found by adding the friction horsepower to the brake horsepower. This quantity is the indicated horsepower of the engine, so called from an instrument known as the engine indicator, which is used to measure the pressure on the piston and thus calculate the power developed in the cylinder.
Mechanical efficiency is defined as brake horsepower in percent of indicated horsepower and is usually between 70 and 90 percent for normal operating speeds.
A quantity called brake mean effective pressure is obtained by multiplying the mean effective pressure of an engine by its mechanical efficiency. This is a commonly used index expressing the ability of the engine, per unit of cylinder bore, to develop both useful pressure in the cylinders and delivery power. If the power delivered is increased by any change other than an increase in speed or cylinder dimensions, its brake mean effective pressure increases proportionately.
Comparison with other engines
When the gasoline engine is compared with other types of internal-combustion engines, certain similarities and differences, as well as some advantages and disadvantages, become apparent. The diesel engine and the gas engine (an engine utilizing a gas such as compressed natural gas or propane as the fuel) have a good deal in common with the gasoline engine, since they are all cylinder-and-piston engines that burn air-fuel mixtures in contact with moving components. The important difference that distinguishes the diesel engine is that it has no spark-ignition system. Compared with a gasoline engine of the same horsepower, the diesel engine is heavier and more expensive, but it has a longer life and operates at less cost per horsepower-hour because it burns less fuel.
The gas engine has much in common with the gasoline engine; in fact, in some instances their differences are very slight at best. Structurally, the difference lies primarily in the substitution of a gas-mixing valve for a carburetor. The cylinder and piston configurations are the same. In general, gases have better antiknock qualities than gasoline, permitting slightly higher compression ratios without knock or other combustion difficulties.
From the standpoint of application, the gas engine burning natural gas, manufactured gas, or industrial by-product gas is limited primarily to stationary power plant use because it must remain connected to the gas pipeline. If, however, the fuel is liquefied petroleum gas, sometimes called bottled gas, the containers of gas can be carried in a vehicle, leading to much flexibility in applications. The present obstacle is that facilities are not readily available for replenishing the gas supply.
Development of gasoline engines
While attempts to devise heat engines were made in ancient times, the steam engine of the 18th century was the first successful type. The internal-combustion engine, which followed in the 19th century as an improvement over the steam engine for many applications, cannot be attributed to any single inventor. The piston, thought to date as far back as 150 bc, was used by metalworkers in pumps for blowing air. The piston-and-cylinder system was basic to the steam engine, which brought the component to a high state of efficiency. The steam engine, however, suffered from low thermal efficiency, great weight and bulk, and inconvenience of operation, all of which were primarily traceable to the necessity of burning the fuel in a furnace separate from the engine. It became evident that a self-contained power unit was desirable.
As early as the 17th century, several experimenters first tried to use hot gaseous products to operate pumps. By 1820 an engine was built in England in which hydrogen-air mixtures were exploded in a chamber. The chamber was then cooled to create a vacuum acting on a piston. The sale of such gas engines began in 1823. They were heavy and crude but contained many essential elements of later, more-successful devices. In 1824 the French engineer Sadi Carnot published his now classic pamphlet “Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat,” which outlined fundamental internal-combustion theory. Over the next several decades inventors and engineers built engines that used pressure produced by the combustion of fuels rather than a vacuum and engines in which the fuel was compressed before burning. None of them succeeded in developing an operational system, however. Finally, in 1860 Étienne Lenoir of France marketed an engine that operated on illuminating gas and provided reasonably satisfactory service. The Lenoir engine was essentially a converted double-acting steam engine with slide valves for admitting gas and air and for discharging exhaust products. Although the Lenoir engine developed little power and utilized only about 4 percent of the energy in the fuel, hundreds of these devices were in use in France and Britain within five years. They were used for powering water pumps and printing presses and for completing certain other tasks that required only limited power output.
A major theoretical advance occurred with the publication in 1862 of a description of the ideal operating cycle of an internal-combustion engine. The author, the French engineer Alphonse Beau de Rochas, laid down the following conditions as necessary for optimum efficiency: maximum cylinder volume with minimum cooling surface, maximum rapidity of expansion, maximum ratio of expansion, and maximum pressure of the ignited charge. He described the required sequence of operations as (1) suction during an entire outstroke of the piston, (2) compression during the following instroke, (3) ignition of the charge at dead centre and expansion during the next outstroke (the power stroke), and (4) expulsion of the burned gases during the next instroke. The engine Beau de Rochas described thus had a four-stroke cycle, in contrast to the two-stroke cycle (intake-ignition and power-exhaust) of the Lenoir engine. Beau de Rochas never built his engine, and no four-stroke engine appeared for more than a decade. Finally, in 1876, the German engineer Nikolaus A. Otto built an internal-combustion unit based on Beau de Rochas’s principle. (Otto’s firm, Otto and Langen, had produced and marketed an improved two-stroke engine several years earlier.) The four-stroke Otto engine was an immediate success. In spite of its great weight and poor economy, nearly 50,000 engines with a combined capacity of about 200,000 horsepower were sold in 17 years, followed by the rapid development of a wide variety of engines of the same type. Manufacture of the Otto engine in the United States began in 1878, following the grant to Otto of a U.S. patent in 1877.
Eight years later Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach, former associates of Otto, developed the first successful high-speed four-stroke engine and invented a carburetor that made it possible to use gasoline for fuel. They employed their engine to power a bicycle (perhaps the world’s first motorcycle) and later a four-wheeled carriage. At about the same time, another German mechanical engineer, Karl Benz, built a one-cylinder gasoline engine to power what is often considered the first practical automobile. The engines built by Daimler, Maybach, and Benz were fundamentally the same as today’s basic gasoline engine. For information about subsequent enhancements and advances, see automobile.
Orville C. Cromer Charles Lafayette Proctor