2024-09-19 01:29:46
Porsche has revealed a strange, and perhaps genius, idea for a six-stroke internal combustion engine.
With very few exceptions from the socialist past, every internal combustion car uses a four-stroke engine: intake, compression, expansion and exhaust. The intake stroke is where air and fuel enter the cylinder. Compression is when the piston pushes the mixture to the top of the cylinder. The mixture is ignited and the expansion pushes the piston down. The exhaust system is the final stage that pushes the remaining gas out of the cylinder.
Porsche designers believe they can add another stroke of compression and expansion to this process. Documents filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office specifically describe this process as “six separate cycles that can be divided into two sequences of three cycles.” The added stages will appear between the traditional expansion beat and drop beat. Therefore, the first sequence will be intake-compression-expansion, followed by compression-expansion-discharge.
To this end, the Porsche patent shows a crankshaft that rotates on a ring with two concentric circles. This changes the center point of rotation, effectively reducing the stroke of the piston (bottom dead center) for the additional strokes. This in turn changes the compression as the piston is no longer moving as high (at top dead center) in the cylinder. This also means that this engine has two top and bottom dead centers.
So this motor has the potential to generate more power with better efficiency. In a typical engine, only one out of every four strokes actually produces power. Here it happens every third turn and the mixture burns better.
As with many patents, this one may never see the light of day.