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 ...

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

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, ...

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 ...

Heat is also a byproduct of friction. Think about rubbing your hands together to warm them up. The faster you rub your hands together, the hotter they get. Now think about the pistons in your ...

While Tesla, General Motors, Nissan, BMW and other automakers doggedly push to bring battery-powered vehicles into the mainstream, Achates (a-KATE-ezz) Power engineers are betting that an old ...

Despite being in use for more than a century, combustion engines are still way to complex and inefficient in turing fossil fuel to mechanical work. Naturally, engineers have been battling their way ...

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 ...

Piston rings are the seals in your cylinders, giving you better compression and power, but what happens if they wear or break ...