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Horizontally-opposed engines are often referred to as “boxer” engines because the motion of the pistons sort of resembles a boxer, punching. Really, though, if any engine should be named for a boxer, it’s the other kind of opposed engine: the kind where the pistons actually “punch” right at each other. They’re called opposed-piston engines, and they’re fascinating.
Opposed-piston engines are not new at all; they’ve been around since the late 1800s, and even earlier in steam form. In fact, the famous Civil War ironclad USS Monitor used a variant of an opposed-piston engine known as a “vibrating lever” engine.
Essentially, an opposed-piston internal combustion engine is a two-stroke engine with no cylinder head, two separate crankshafts, onto which two sets of pistons are connected, with the pistons sharing one cylinder.
The pistons meet (well, nearly meet) at the center of the cylinder, the top dead center (TDC) for both pistons. ports on the sides of the cylinder let fuel/air in and exhaust out, and are exposed by the motion of the piston.
[...] What’s especially notable about the engines is that, in three-cylinder (remember, six-piston) form, the Achates Power vertically-oriented opposed-piston diesel engine shown in the video there managed to obtain thermal efficiencies in the high 40s/low 50s percent. Keep in mind that a conventional four-stroke diesel engine will only be about 35 percent thermally efficient, on average. That’s a big bump.
Source: https://jalopnik.com/its-time-to-learn-about-wonderful-and-weird-opposed-pis-1827804895
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 27 2018, @02:42AM (1 child)
The real problem is that one ICE has no measurable effect on the environment. But there are literally Millions of them out there. Billions, even. And the more concentrated they are (think urban areas, aka downtown LA), the more detrimental the cumulative effects become.
Convert the majority of the population to electric engines (again, think urbanites, LA, new york, etc) and the worlds shipping to something (anything!) better than the low-grade fuel oil they currently use, and the planet will be vastly better off. Those very few urbanites who insist on clinging to their ICE's, or the hordes of ruralites who do the same, will have very little impact on air quality.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday July 27 2018, @05:45PM
No. If you take out "The real problem is that" and change the word "detrimental" to "significant", then you get something workable.
Changing millions or billions of polluting vehicles to instead use clean fuel with simple molecules that doesn't leave behind particulate matter, within a new fuel system that captures-and-releases carbon instead of only releasing it as the petroleum-based system does, should be the holy grail of anti-pollution in the context of current gasoline/diesel engines, and yet you are arguing against it.
Why? You love pollution too much? You are against clean air? What?
Clean, molecularly simple fuels that don't give off particulate matter when burned would revolutionize the air quality not to mention the health and safety conditions of Downtown L.A. Yet you don't want that... why, exactly?