INTERNAL-COMBUSTION ENGINE

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because of the small standby losses with these engines during the shutdown period.
History
The first experimental internal combustion engine was made by a Dutch astronomer, Christian Huygens, who, in 1680, applied a principle advanced by Jean de Hautefeuille in 1678 for drawing water. This principle was based on the fact that the explosion of a small amount of gunpowder in a closed chamber provided with escape valves would create a vacuum when the gases of combustion cooled. Huygens, using a cylinder containing a piston, was able to move it in this manner by the external atmospheric pressure.
The first commercially practical internal combustion engine was built by a French engineer, ( Jean Joseph ) Etienne Lenoir, about 1859-1860. It used illuminating gas as fuel. Two years later, Alphonse Beau de Rochas enunciated the principles of the four-stroke cycle, but Nickolaus August Otto built the first successful engine ( 1876 ) operating on this principle.

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called the intake manifold and, in many engines, a similar exhaust manifold is provided to carry off the gases produced by combustion. The fuel is admitted to each cylinder and the waste gases exhausted through mechanically operated poppet valves or sleeve valves. The valves are normally held closed by the pressure of springs and are opened at the proper time during the operating cycle by cams on a rotating camshaft that is geared to the crankshaft . By the 1980s more sophisticated fuel-injection systems, also used in diesel engines, had largely replaced this traditional method of supplying the proper mix of air and fuel; computer-controlled monitoring systems improved fuel economy and ...

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