Once I put my key in the ignition and turn the car on what are the sequence of events that take place?

Question

Once I put my key in the ignition and turn the car on what are the sequence of events that take place?

In: 753

Answer 1

Your key is directly connected to the starter. This is a pre motor that turns the engine’s crank over and starts the combustion process.

Have you ever seen the old movies of the model t where they had to get out and physically turn that handle to get the engine started? Or the old ww2 Era planes that required the propeller to be spun by hand to start the plane? Or something as simple as lawn tools like a lawn mower, wead Wacker, or chain saw that use a draw string to turn the motor over and get it started.

The starter primes the engine with gas, and uses the battery to jump the spark plugs and crank the pistons. When the pistons crank, they creat compression in the combustion chamber, squeezing the air and gas in there, at maximum compression the park plug kicks in creating the combustion needed to operated the engine. Once this happens, the process becomes self sustaining, as long as the battery remains strong enough to send power to the spark plugs, and there’s enough gas to fuel the process.

Our engines run a 4 cycle process that sounds like a porno, suck, squeeze, bang, blow.

The intake valve opens, and due to vacume suction, air goes into the combustion chamber the pistons compress the air and fuel, this is the squeeze stage. The bang is the spark plug igniting the process. The preasure from the explosion builds up pushing the pistons down, opening the exhaust valve, and expelling the now combustion exhaust out through the exhaust system and eventualling the tail pipe, blow.

The engine has 4, 6 or 8 cylinders running in opposition to eachother, while one chamber is suckibg in, another is blowing out, the momentum of on vhambers blow forces another chamber to suck and compress. This requires a timing belt to sync these processes together allowing the system to run smoothly. Mostly the timing belt works to open and close the intake and exhaust valves, but it is times to the crank shift, which runs the pistons below.