An engine with no crankshaft, where the pistons float on air? It’s not a dream; it’s a free piston engine and it might be the next major advance in car tech. When we think of automotive technology of ...

A 75-kilowatt heavy-oil piston engine developed by the Beijing Power Machinery Institute is tested on a rotorcraft. [Photo/China Daily] The Beijing Power Machinery Institute, a subsidiary of China ...

One of the many challenges facing engine designers is the need to increase power output while simultaneously retaining or improving efficiency. Although a four-cylinder engine is still an engineering ...

Mazda's five-decade-long, largely futile efforts on behalf of the rotary engine demonstrate how difficult it is to unseat the conventional piston engine. Yet new concepts continue to emerge, ...

We all know how a conventional internal combustion engine works, with a piston and a crankshaft. But that’s by no means the only way to make an engine, and one of the slightly more unusual ...

The internal combustion engine, for all its mechanical sophistication, still runs on a 19th-century mechanical idea: pistons ...

Human creativity, it seems, knows no bounds when it comes to inventing new ways to build a petroleum-based fire inside an enclosed metal space and then convert the resulting energy pulse into forward ...