LEEVENSPARK

Alternator The alternator is what keeps a car's battery charged. In essence, the alternator is a generator run by the car's engine. Most alternators are attached to the engine by a belt. As the engine runs, it spins the belt, which turns components in the alternator that change this mechanical energy into electrical energy. That electrical energy is stored in the battery. Keep your alternator running smoothly by routinely checking the belts that connect it to the engine. Make sure the belts aren't dry or frayed, and are tightly connected to both the alternator and the engine.

Air/Fuel Mixture Also it is called the air/fuel ratio, the air/fuel mixture is ratio of air to fuel present in an engine during combustion. The correct air/fuel mixture will result in good engine power and efficiency. The wrong mixture will result in suboptimal performance and efficiency. On older engines, this mixture is made in the carburetor. On newer engines, the fuel injection system injects the correct amount of fuel directly into the cylinder for the best combustion .

When you drive down the street, you see hybrid automobiles every day. But how about a hybrid bulldozer? We'll talk about hybrids on the construction site, today, on Engineering Works! Or listen to the podcast . Hybrid automobiles have been around for quite a while. Honda introduced the first gasoline-electric hybrid to the United States in 1999. In 2004, Toyota started selling the Prius and Ford’s Escape hybrid S-U-V came on the market. Now, it seems like everybody’s got a hybrid. Even Cadillac and Mercedes-Benz. Everybody sees why driving a hybrid makes sense, mostly great gas mileage. Some, more than 50 miles per gallon. And then there’s the hybrid bulldozer. Yep, bulldozer. You know, the big yellow machines that push dirt around construction sites. Caterpillar has brought out a hybrid bulldozer, a diesel-electric version of its D7 dozer. It’s the first one, and it seems to do the same for dozers that the Prius and its automotive brethren do for automobiles. The D7E, for electric

A four-bar linkage [or] simply a 4-bar or four-bar is the simplest movable linkage . It consists of four rigid bodies (called bars or links), each attached to two others by single joints or pivots to form a closed loop. Four-bars are simple mechanisms common in mechanical engineering machine design and fall under the study of kinematics . If each joint has one rotational degree of freedom (i.e., it is a pivot), then the mechanism is usually planar , and the 4-bar is determinate if the positions of any two bodies are known (although there may be two solutions). One body typically does not move (called the ground link , fixed link , or the frame ), so the position of only one other body is needed to find all positions. The two links connected to the ground link are called grounded links . The remaining link, not directly connected to the ground link, is called the coupler link . In terms of mechanical action, one of the grounded links is selected to be the input link , i.e., th

Slider-Crank Mechanism ,   arrangement of mechanical parts designed to convert straight-line motion to rotary motion , as in a reciprocating piston engine , or to convert rotary motion to straight-line motion, as in a reciprocating piston pump. The basic nature of the mechanism and the relative motion of the parts can best be described with the aid of the accompanying , in which the moving parts are lightly shaded. The darkly shaded part 1, the fixed frame or block of the pump or engine, contains a cylinder, depicted in cross section by its walls DE and FG, in which the piston. for the video of the above mechanism click here

THE GIST OF THE STORY Jaguar has unveiled a new turbine-powered car, the C-X75. The car runs on micro-sized turbine engines that burn fuel to charge the battery, which powers four electric motors. The car can go from 0-62 mph in 3.4 seconds and has a range of 560 miles.   ===========================================================   Jaguar, working with Bladon Jets, recently unveiled a hybrid concept car, the C-X75, that can accelerate from 0 to 62 mph in a blistering 3.4 seconds. The car gets its power from two new micro-sized gas turbine engines that are slightly larger and longer than a human forearm. The jet-like engines feed four electric motors, which give the car a range of 560 miles. "It has long been a dream to get gas turbines into a car; the automotive industry has been trying for 50-plus years," said Gary Lamb, Director at Bladon Jets. "It is only now that we have a viable proposition." To most people a gas turbine engine is the huge c

April 29, 2009 -- Hoping to bridge the gap between airplanes and rocketships , the U.S. military is preparing to test an experimental aircraft that can fly more than six times faster than the speed of sound on ordinary jet fuel. the X-51, but folks like to call it the WaveRider because it stays airborne, in part, with lift generated by the shock waves of its own flight. The design stems from the goal of the program -- to demonstrate an air-breathing, hypersonic, combustion ramjet engine, known as a scramjet. "We built a vehicle around an engine," said Joseph Vogel, the X-51 project manager with Boeing, which is building a series of four test planes under a $246.5-million program managed by the Air Force Research Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. Scramjets use the forward motion of an engine to compress air for fuel combustion. It's similar to a ramjet engine, but at supersonic speeds. NASA tested the concept in 2004, breaking the record for a jet-powered aircraft

New Solar Technology To Generate Electricity is almost a cliche these days. Let’s look at some promising old technology. Today, on Engineering Works! Listen to the podcast. When people talk about solar energy, they usually mean one of two things. Photovoltaic panels or solar concentrating plants. Some engineers are trying something else. An updated version of a two-hundred-year-old invention to turn sunlight into electricity. This old technology is something called a Stirling engine. A Scottish clergyman named, you guessed it, Stirling, invented it in 1816. The idea is simple. A Stirling engine has two cylinders and pistons. Kind of like a two-cylinder motorcycle engine. The space above the pistons is filled with a fluid, usually air or helium. Heat the gas in one cylinder and it expands, moving the piston. The gas cools and moves to the other cylinder, where it moves that piston and flows back to the first cylinder, where it’s heated again and the whole cycle starts over. It’s m

THE GIST OF THE STORY Combustion engines are incredibly inefficient. Some engineers are looking into ways to recover wasted energy. ================================================================   To hear some people tell it, the internal combustion engine is dead. Some engineers aren’t so sure. We’ll check it out. Today, on Engineering Works! Listen to the podast. Just about everybody knows a little about internal combustion engines. They’re what powers almost all of our cars, trucks and motorcycles. They’ve been around for more than a hundred years, and they’re boring. They’re also really inefficient. Only about a quarter of the energy in fuel actually turns the wheels and takes us down the highway. The rest, mostly heat, is just wasted. Engineers are looking into some nifty ways to get that wasted energy back. One group of British engineers are working on a tiny turbine that would fit in the tailpipe. Exhaust from the engine would spin the turbine. It would drive