Por qué los Motores de Cinco Tiempos Son Más Eficientes pero Siguen Siendo un Fracaso

As you probably know, internal combustion engines aren't very efficient. On average, modern passenger car gasoline engines achieve around 35%, while diesel versions can reach slightly over 40%, but they require complex and expensive emissions control equipment to be as clean as their gasoline counterparts. An efficiency of 35% means that, of the energy present in the fuel, only 35% is converted into useful work. The rest is lost. Some is lost through internal friction, but most escapes as heat and noise through the exhaust. So why is so much energy lost? Why can't we harness it more efficiently? The problem is that all four strokes in a four-stroke engine are the same length and duration, and of those four strokes, only the combustion stroke produces a significant amount of energy. The remaining three strokes primarily consume energy. This means that an engine would be more efficient if it had more time to harness energy. One way to increase engine efficiency is to increase the compression ratio. The compression ratio is simply the ratio of the volume of the smallest to the largest cylinder. However, the positive effects of increasing it are limited due to the limitation of its ability to increase it. At some point, the combustion space becomes so small that combustion occurs so close to the piston that too much energy is transferred too quickly, making it difficult for even the most robust engines to handle these fluctuations. Therefore, we are limited in what we can do with the compression ratio. This means we must look for other ways to increase efficiency; ideally, the strokes should be unequal. What we really want is for the combustion stroke, also known as the expansion stroke, to be somewhat longer than the others. Of course, the conventional rotating assembly does not allow for different lengths for the different strokes, so James Atkinson decided to abandon the traditional engine anatomy and created a new anatomy that allowed him to have a noticeably longer combustion or expansion stroke. Even the inventor of the four-stroke engine, Nikolaus Otto, saw the limitations of his design and wanted to increase the time and space for expansion and energy utilization. However, Otto, along with Gottlieb Daimler, decided to take a different approach. Instead of creating a novel and unproven rotating assembly, they decided to build on the anatomy of the existing engine. They simply added another cylinder to harness the remaining energy of the exhaust gases. Instead of allowing the exhaust gases to escape into the atmosphere, the high-pressure cylinders sent them to the low-pressure cylinder, where the remaining exhaust gas pressure was used to drive the larger central piston. In this way, the outer cylinders functioned like normal four-stroke cylinders. Well, that all sounds great in theory, but Otto and Gottlieb's five-stroke engine was a failure. It was marketed, but its performance was low, and production was quickly discontinued. Probably because Gottlieb and Otto were working with technology from the late 19th century. Thus, the design was abandoned, but not forgotten. It lay dormant for 124 years until 2003, when it was revived by Belgian engineer and inventor Gerhard Schmitz, who patented a three-cylinder, five-stroke engine virtually identical to Otto and Daimler's design. Of course, obtaining a patent for a theoretical concept is one thing. Turning that concept into a working prototype is another. But in this case, Gerhard Schmitz managed to convince a very reputable company to bring his idea to life: Ilmor Engineering. You may not have heard of them, but Ilmor is nothing like the startups built around innovative engine designs. Founded in 1983 by Mario Illien and Paul Morgan, Ilmor Engineering has successfully designed and developed engines for Chevrolet in IndyCar racing, for Sauber and McLaren in Formula 1, and has even competed in MotoGP. So, when a company like this takes on the development of a novel engine design, it certainly gives it credibility and high hopes of reaching mass production. So Ilmor got to work, and just four years later, in 2007, we had a working prototype. #d4aespanol #cincotiempos