How does the internal combustion engine work?

Answer 1

It depends on the engine you are talking about, but I assume you mean a common internal combustion engine found in cars, so I will discuss that first. Basically you have a block of metal that has holes drilled into it called cylinders. Inside each cylider is a piston which is attached to a crankshaft. There are usually 4,6 or 8 and sometimes 5 pistons in a common vehicle but there are also 1, 2, 3,10,12, and 16 cylinder engines in motorcylces (1,2), some small cars (3) and big trucks (10) or supercars like ferarries or bugattis (10,12,16). The pistons are attached to a crank shaft that when turned will pull some pistons down and push others up. When a piston is pulled down it sucks fuel and air into the cylinder and then when it is pushed back up it compresses the fuel and air and ignites it with a spark from the sparkplug. The resulting "explosion" forces the piston down, which inturn forces other pistons up and the cycle repeats. After the explosion occurs the piston goes down and then is pushed back up by the force from the other pistons which inturn forces the exhaust out of the engine. This is the basic concept of the internal combustion engine.

Other engines include the rotary engine (which in my opinion is very cool), the jet engine, turbine engines, rocket engines and many others. If you go to www.howstuffworks.com and type in any of those, they will give you a decent explanation of how they work along with some visuals to help you understand it better.