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Bore and Stroke
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Glenn
Research
Center
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On this page we present some technical definitions that are used
to describe an
internal combustion engine.
The figure shows a computer animation of one cylinder of the Wright brothers'
1903 aircraft engine.
A small section of the
crankshaft
is shown in red, the piston and piston rod are shown in gray, and
the cylinder which contains the piston is shown in blue. We have cut the
cylinder so that we can note the movement of the piston.
The crankshaft makes one revolution while the piston moves
from the top of the cylinder (lower left in the figure)
to the bottom (upper right) and back to the top.
Since the piston is connected to the crankshaft,
we can note the movement of the piston by the angle of rotation of the crankshaft.
Zero degrees occurs when the piston is at the top of the cylinder. Since there
are 360 degrees in one revolution, the piston is at the bottom when the crank angle
is 180 degrees. The distance traveled by the piston from zero degrees to 180
degrees is called the stroke - S of the piston.
This explains why the Wright engine and modern automobile engines are called
four-stroke engines.
The piston makes four strokes and the crankshaft makes two revolutions between
combustion firings.
The diameter of the piston,
and the inside diameter of the cylinder, is called the bore - B.
So the area A
of the head of the piston is pi (3.14159) times the diameter squared divided by
four.
A = pi * B^2 / 4
The volume swept out during any complete stroke is the piston area times
the stroke:
V = pi * S * B^2 / 4
This volume is called the working fluid volume because the
work
performed by a moving gas under pressure is equal to the pressure of the gas times
the volume of gas which is moved.
For their 1903 engine, the Wright brothers selected a bore of 4 inches and a
stroke of 4 inches. The working fluid volume for one piston is then 50.26 cubic
inches. The brothers used four pistons, so the sum of all of the working
volumes is 201 cubic inches. For any internal combustion engine, the sum of
all of the working volumes of all the cylinders
is called the total displacement of the engine.
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