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How Car Engine Work?

Your car is an amazing machine, inside and out. One of the most important parts to its functionality is the engine.

You may love the contoured body, the booming sound system, and even the tech features that make your car comfortable to drive. But without the engine, your car is all look and no substance. It’d be a great sight to sit in your driveway, but it wouldn’t be very good at getting you places.

What are the parts and processes in play that make a car engine operate correctly and provide the power your car needs to move?

How Car Engine Work

How Car Engines Work – A Step by Step Guide

When you’re asking how car engines work, you’re inquiring about a multi-step process. That’s because car engines have a lot of interconnected parts and separate processes that come together to make everything work the way they should.

Let’s examine a four-step process that will show the basics of how an engine works: 

  1. The Intake Stroke

The engine in your car has pistons. These are mechanical cylinders that move up and down, thanks in large part to a rotating piece of metal attached to a connecting rod. When the piston dips down, it is known as the intake stroke. The substance your car is intaking here is actually two substances – a combination of fuel and air.

You know your car needs gas or diesel, depending on what kind of engine it has. This fuel is injected from the fuel tank and the connected line via a fuel pump. Then, air is injected from the outside of the vehicle through an air filter. The filter ensures bugs, dust, and other debris don’t contaminate the fuel/air mixture. When the piston goes down, the resulting space and air pressure sucks in the fuel/air combination.

  1. Compression Stroke

This process happens when all the valves in your car close, and the piston comes back up. As the space closes and the piston rises, the fuel-air mixture is compressed. This ensures that the mixture delivers the best amount of power and efficiency to provide the power your engine needs to operate. 

In order for this to work correctly, your car needs to have good piston speed and activity. The question of how car engines work is also a question about how pistons operate, as well as the function they serve in the fuel combustion process.

  1. Power Stroke

This is where things start to get interesting. Here, the fuel isn’t just sucked in or compressed. It’s actually ignited to create a powerful chemical reaction. The result? The piston is pushed back down by the force of the reaction, which in turn transfers power back to the connecting rod and the piece of metal below it. 

This gives the engine room to start the cycle over. The piston is pushed back up when more fuel and air get pumped into the top portion, which leads to the final main process in the engine’s main functions.

  1. Exhaust Stroke

This is the stroke that sees the piston come back up, which pushes the remaining spent mixture out through exhaust ports, allowing for the engine to be clean and free of any unused fuel or unusable fuel. The result is an efficient machine that generates the power you need through mechanical motion and chemical reactions, each of which lends power to the other.

How Car Engine Work

Other Facts About How Car Engines Work

When we’re talking about how car engines work, technically every part under the hood could be referenced in some way, since they all work together in some capacity. You’ll need spark plugs to transfer an electric charge, oil pumps to transfer lubricating fluid, and so on.

The question of how car engines work may lead you to realize their car has seen better days and may need to be replaced. If learning how car engines work causes you to discover your engine isn’t in good shape, you may be asking – where can I trade junk cars for cash near me?

When you’re looking for junk car pick up for cash, choose US Junk Cars and get the highest price guaranteed!