Why are diesel car engines so much louder than petrol, they sound like tractors?
In: Engineering
Diesel engines operate by causing the fuel to ignite by the rapid heating that occurs when the air and fuel is compressed. In a gasoline engine, the mixture is ignited by the spark plugs.
To get the fuel/air mix to combust without a spark requires *much* higher pressure than in an equivalent gasoline engine. The result is also a much more powerful explosion, making for more noise, but also more energy released for a given displacement size, which is why diesels tend to have higher horsepower and torque, and somewhat better efficiency than gasoline engines.
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