"Vrooooom!" What happens when you turn the key in your car? How does your engine work anyway? Internal combustion engines have been around for centuries and are an important part of our everyday lives. There are different types and sizes, but they all use the same basic concept, combustion of a fuel to produce energy, which is one of many ways that chemistry partakes in our daily routine. .
In an internal combustion engine, combustion takes place in a confined space, and produces expanding gasses that are directly used to generate power (Internal Combustion Engine). These engines are classified as reciprocating or rotary engines. In a reciprocating engine, the most common of the two, combustion takes place in a cylinder that has a piston that goes up and down, while a rotary engine has fewer parts and uses a disk based system (Internal Combustion Engine). There are also spark ignition and compression ignition engines. The fuel is simple ignited by a spark in an SI engine, however in a CI engine the fuel is spontaneously ignited when the temperature and pressure is high enough (Stone). Two and four stroke engines vary in that a two-stroke engines fire every revolution, where as four-strokes only fire every other. The most common engine, which is found in most automobiles is a reciprocating, spark igniting, four stroke gasoline engine.
Other types of combustion engines are reaction engines and gas turbine engines. Reaction engines are used mainly in rockets, and the gas turbine, used in turbojet engines. (Internal Combustion Engines).
The history of the internal combustion engine goes back three hundred and twenty years. A Dutch physicist named Christian Huygens unproductively experimented with the idea of using gunpowder for providing motive power. Eight years later, Papin, a British scientist, described this gunpowder engine to the Royal Society of London and continued the research of Huygens.