JovialJman - How Engines Work

"Beacause, engines never look the same when looked at to closely." - JovialJman

Without engines, we all would be driving around like in the cartoon of The Flintstones. pushing our heavy vehicles around and having massive legs, (who needs gym then). These wonderful pieces of machine are very complicated in its workings, so let's talk about that.

When talking about engines there are several kinds, so we shall concentrate on Gasoline and Diesel engines though as they are the some what in use of everyday lives of many. Both use explosions to push down a piston that turns a crank shaft producing rotational motion which is used in various ways and the end results are that the tires move to make the car move forward or backwards.

Since Petrol is the most common, from where I come from, I shall start with the Diesel engine. The engine has 4 strokes, or rather 4 different events that happen for one engine cycle to take place. Once in motion, the first step is that the engine needs air. So the crankshaft is turned lowering a piston, at the same time a valve opens up to let air from outside (or a turbine) which fills the cylinder. The inlet valve is then closed and the piston moves upwards, this compresses the air and thereby increases the temperature and presure of the air. Once the piston is at the top of the cylinder ,diesel is injected into this mixture by a nozzle, and since the air is at such a high temperature the diesel automatically ignites, which forces the piston down. Due to the residual momentme, the piston then comes up and the outlet valve is opened to let all the waste material out. Once closed the inlet valve opens and the process starts from the beginning again.

This Image shows the 4 stages of the diesel engine.

Since there is only one stage that there is force to turn the bar at the bottom, the power is not very uniform. To get more stable power there are four cylinders hooked up together to allow that, at any given time, there are all four strokes happening. This means that there is always a force pushing down on one of the cylinders, (the more cylinders you have, the more uniform the output power will be), thus giving a better driving experience, (this video along with this one explains, with use of an animation, how they work).

Petrol (aka gas) engine workings are very similar to a Diesel. There is also 4 strokes in the engine cycle but there are some that have 2 strokes, (mainly the older smaller vehicles, like older bikes). The 4 strokes are, first there is a air and fuel mixture that is sucked into the cylinder through an inlet valve when the piston moves down. The valve closes and the Piston moves up again. The mixture is compressed, but since petrol has a higher ignition point than diesel it has to be ignited, So the spark plug provides the ignition source and the mixture explodes which forces the piston down, (this is, again, the only stroke that produces power to the crankshaft) once it reaches the bottom the crankshaft turns it more and forces it up and the outlet valve opens, which takes all the waste material out. when the piston starts going down again, the inlet valve lets in a new air, fuel mix and the process repeats. It takes 2 revolutions to complete one cycle.

2 Stroke engines don't really have valves. When the cylinder moves down it draws in air through an opening. when the cylinder moves up, it goes past the hole, preventing the air-fuel mixture to escape, and it compresses it. The spark plug ignites the mixture forcing the piston to go down. on the way down an exit hole is reveals and the fumes escape, and when the piston continues down, the inlet hole is reveals again and a new mixture is sucked into the cylinder.

2 strokes have some advantages over 4 stroke engines, namely, since that have less parts, they can be lighter and produce more power for their size, but some of the disadvantages are that since there outlet whole and inlet hole are open at the same time, some of the fuel mixture escapes before being used, this means that it uses more fuel and is worse on the environment as there are more emissions as well. Because of the price of fuel, the 4 stroke is preferred as it is better for your wallet, (if you own a vehicle you shall understand).

Anyways, that is my discussion on the internal workings of 2 popular types of engines in our cars today. Electric Cars and jet engines shall be coming soon. Please let us here at TSCA know of any experiences you have had with engines, or if you preform petrol or diesel cars better down in the comments, on Facebook or over on Twitter, as we love to hear from you. Do you have friends that would like to be a mechanic, or just loves fire, please share this post with them as I am sure they would appreciate the thought. If you, yourself would like to see the newest post as they come out, please Follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook, using the associated buttons on the bar to the left, Thank you for taking the time ti read today's post, and I shall write again overmorrow.

Travel safe my friends.

OddballGreg - Web Design (HTML, CSS, Javascript, More)

The best header images are the ones where you can't see anything useful... right? My apologies for getting in the way. Teehee. Screenshot is from the third tutorial project at https://dash.generalassemb.ly

HTML. Even the acronym sounds intimidating. Too bad most of the internet runs on it, so it's probably a good idea to realize that it's not actually that hard. If someone bothers to explain it properly. It also happens to be really awesome.

Yesterday, I started doing a set of tutorials for HTML, CSS and Javascript made by a website called Dash, as was suggested to me by someone because of my interests in web design. The good news was, I already had a somewhat rudimentary understanding of HTML thanks to tinkering with the blog you're reading right now. The bad news was that tinkering and doing aren't the same thing, and a day later and 2 cups of coffee later, (that's a lot considering I don't drink coffee ever really), I had experienced several interesting things in the process of doing these tutorials at https://dash.generalassemb.ly.

Firstly, when someone. (or something in this case), actually explains something to you properly, it is VERY easy to learn new skills. Although I had learnt a fair chunk of HTML skills through trial and error, I've gotta say, these tutorials would have saved me days of arduous effort if I'd found them first. (*facedesk*) The GeneralAssembly tutorials go to great lengths to explain not only how to do certain things, but why you need to do them, why they work the way they do and why they were designed to work that way. Quite frankly, if you don't come out of these tutorials feeling like an HTML expert, then you should get some sleep and try again tomorrow, since it's hard to learn when you're that exhausted.

As I soon learnt though, HTML is actually an immensely intuitive language once you understand how it works. HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is effectively a list of tag's that tell your computer what it needs to display. CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, are what tells you computer how to display those HTML tags by assigning attributes to the tags. (That's the layman's version at any rate.) Once you understand that, the hardest part of HTML is learning what you actually want to do to get the desired effect. Thankfully again, the earlier linked tutorials slowly introduces you to effectively everything you would need to know in order to do everything from making fancy blogs to designing robots purely from HTML. (Not as difficult as you would expect.)

Robots are fun. They're also fun to give flashing red eyes. Dash teaches you how to do that too if you're interested.

What gets interesting later about the Dash tutorials is that it eventually starts introducing you to Javascript in order to do everything from creating interactive page elements to showing alerts about various things, as well as all manner of other interesting things. The first thing I realized when doing these Javascript tutorials is that programming is far more fun than I expected. The second thing that I realized is that programming is far more irritating than I expected, and I suddenly understood why all my programmer friends always sounded so suicidal. (Sadly not a joke. If you are feeling suicidal by the way, please contact a suicide hotline. Suicide is not the answer my friend, no matter how appealing it might sound.)

Macabre subjects aside, part of this whole endeavor was to have some interesting new experience to blog about, so I hope you appreciate the amount of work I put into this one considering I've effectively been researching this subject since yesterday afternoon. (Though it was somewhat to my benefit, so don't sweat it too much.) The subject got fairly interesting when my javascript fun took me to Twitter where I began speaking to good, and rather experienced, friend, @yestinj who has been using Javascript for over 7 years now. Apart from humorously pointing out that my first mistake was actually deciding to learn Javascript, he went on to say how it is actually his favorite language, and that having an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is invaluable for someone attempting to write code, most likely in the hopes of preserving both time and sanity. 

While likely sage advice, I fear I was unable to actually test them out for myself due to the unfortunate fact that of the 3 suggested programs, the highly acclaimed NetBeans became the most unstable program I've ever even tried installing in years. a cumulative 10 crash report dumps from 3 reinstalls, and another 50 in total from plain attempts to get the program to run. (Irony is a program lauded for it's open source compatibility and ease of use, being a bitch to even install... let alone run.)

I'm sure I'll get it functioning eventually if I can figure out what's causing it to behave in such an ornery fashion. The other suggested programs were IntelliJ from http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ and Eclipse from https://www.eclipse.org/, though both are actually more focused on pure Java code, rather than Javascript for the internet. (A blog topic for the future I think.)

In any case, I look forward to tinkering further with Javascript and HTML in general, and perhaps even some more advanced programming languages down the line. But first, I need to go sleep off 10 straight hours of coding and 2 cups of caffeine that I never intended on drinking. If you have some specific questions about HTML, or simply have some interesting tutorial or programming language to suggest I check out, perhaps for future blog post, then do be sure to say so down in the comments below, or via Facebook/Twitter. We here at TCSA love to hear your feedback. Of course, if you have you have any web design enthusiast friends, consider sharing this article with them. I'm sure they, like us here at TCSA, will appreciate it immensely. Better yet, if you yourself would like to read more interesting articles such as this, then please do be sure to like the official TCSA Facebook page and/or follow us via Twitter using the associated buttons on the bar the left so that you can get all the latest posts, as they're published. Regardless of what you do, I thank you for having taken the time to read this post; hope that you have/had an absolutely FANTASTIC day, and I will speak again soon.

Happy coding my friends.