What is your favourite type of engine and why?
October 27, 2009 | Maintenance & Repairs
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Re: “What is your favourite type of engine and why?”
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Personally my favorite engine is a woman. Besides efficiency it can make me do all I should. With gratitude, Can that get better?
On the Engineering side I like Steam. from practical application I was a flight engineer so I’m biased.
I agree, women are the best engine… But some model are very expensive, eheheh
I like muscles. They are very efficient, light weight, and flexible in use. Furthermore, they operate efficiently at low temperatures and can be cooled by evaporation from the skin. They use a fuel that has the following properties: it has the same energy density as gasoline, it is everywhere, and people will pay a fortune to get rid of it. What is that fuel? Body fat. And muscles are extremely good at using this fuel.
Couple the muscles to a bicycle through a skeleton, and you have the most energy-efficient form of transportation ever invented. The vehicle has far less mass than the passenger. Put the passenger on a recumbent bicycle, and he has very low friction.
That’s my idea of a great engine.
I am also familiar with the stirling engine and I currently have four of them. I am also machining a fifth that will be added to my collection.
My favorite engine is the stirling simply because it seems like such underused technology. They can run on nearly any fuel that produces enough heat and are very efficient at converting the heat energy from the burning fuel into energy. This is so because the most useful byproduct of combustion is heat. When gasoline is burned in a car, most of the energy from the fuel is wasted in the form of heat that escapes from the engine’s exhaust. In the future I want to design and machine my own stirling engine so that I can put it in a model boat or car. Of all the precision engine models that you could make, the stirling engine is the easiest design because it has so few moving parts.
If you want to collect small engine models, heat engines are the ones that are easiest to develop a collection with. The next model I am going to get is called a vacuum engine. It is also a heat engine, yet it operates on a different concept than the stirling cycle. You can see a picture of it here:
I think that my favorite engines will be the ones that I make myself; especially if I design it also.