Bojan Vrbnjak
We know four-stroke, two-stroke, Wankel, petrol and diesel engines. But does the internal combustion engine still have a future? At least in the Porsche 911 model, it should be used as long as possible. For this purpose, they are developing very special ideas in Zuffenhausen.
Porsche has now unveiled an unusual (and perhaps excellent) idea for a six-stroke internal combustion engine. If you don't know the basics of the internal combustion engine, we'll try to make it simple. If you know how engines work…we'll still try to keep it simple. With few exceptions, every car with an internal combustion engine has four strokes: intake, compression/ignition, power, and exhaust. During the intake stroke, air and fuel enter the cylinder. During compression, the piston pushes the mixture into the upper part of the cylinder. The mixture is ignited and pushes the piston back down for the power stroke. Exhaust is the last step where the burnt gas is forced out of the cylinder.
Porsche designers believe they can add another level of compression and power to this process. Documents filed with the US Patent Office describe this as 'six individual bars that can be split into two sequences of three bars'. Additional steps would occur between the traditional labor and ejection cycles. So the first sequence would be intrusion-compression-force, followed by compression-force-release. Porsche's patent shows a crankshaft rotating on a ring with two concentric circles - a ring. This changes the center of rotation of the crankshaft so that the piston stroke (bottom dead center) decreases slightly with the additional strokes. This changes the compression, as the piston no longer sits as high in the cylinder (top dead center). That also means it has this engine dve top and bottom dead center.
Why all this complexity? In short, this design can produce more power with greater efficiency. In a conventional engine, only one of the four strokes is actually used to generate power. With this system, the formula is changed to one of three strokes, and in addition, the mixture burns more thoroughly. The downside, of course, is the added complexity. Whether the benefits are sufficient to justify the design remains to be seen. As with many other patents, it is possible that it will never see the light of day. It's certainly an interesting idea, but more importantly, Porsche is working very hard to keep the internal combustion engine alive with the rise of electric motors.
