HOW TWO-STROKE ENGINES WORK:

Two types of engines found in nearly every car and truck on the road
today. Both gasoline and diesel automotive engines are classified as
four-stroke reciprocating internal-combustion engines.
There is a third type of engine, known as a two-stroke engine, which
is commonly found in lower-power applications. Some of the devices
that might have a two-stroke engine include:
Lawn and garden equipment (chain saws, leaf blowers, trimmers),
Dirt bikes, Mopeds, Jet skis, Small outboard motors, Radio-controlled
model planes
In this article, you'll learn all about the two-stroke engine: how it
works, why it might be used and what makes it different from regular
car and diesel engines.
TWO-STROKES BASICS:
This is what a two-stroke engine looks like:
You find two-stroke engines in such
devices as chain saws and jet skis
because two-stroke engines have
three important advantages over
four-stroke engines:
Two-stroke engines do not
have valves, which simplifies
their construction & lowers
their weight.
Two-stroke engines fire once
every revolution, while four-
stroke engines fire once every
other revolution. This gives
two-stroke engines a
significant power boost.
Two-stroke engines can work
in any orientation, which can be important in something like a
chainsaw. A standard four-stroke engine may have problems
with oil flow unless it is upright, and solving this problem can
add complexity to the engine.
These advantages make two-stroke engines lighter, simpler and less
expensive to manufacture. Two-stroke engines also have the
potential to pack about twice the power into the same space because
there are twice as many power strokes per revolution. The
combination of light weight and twice the power gives two-stroke
engines a great power-to-weight ratio compared to many four-
stroke engine designs.
You don't normally see two-stroke engines in cars, however. That's
because two-stroke engines have a couple of significant
disadvantages that will make more sense once we look at how it
operates.
THE TWO STROKE CYCLE:
The following animation shows a two-stroke engine in action. You can
compare this animation to the animations in the car engine and diesel
engine articles to see the differences. The biggest difference to notice
when comparing figures is that the spark-plug fires
once every revolution in a two-stroke engine.
The two-stroke engines are ingenious little devices
that overlap operations in order to reduce the part
count.
SPARKS FLY:
You can understand a two-stroke engine by watching
each part of the cycle. Start with the point where the
spark plug fires. Fuel and air in the cylinder have
been compressed, and when the spark plug fires the mixture ignites.
The resulting explosion drives the piston downward. Note that as
the piston moves downward, it is compressing the air/fuel mixture in
the crankcase. As the piston approaches the bottom of its stroke, the
exhaust port is uncovered. The pressure in the cylinder drives most
of the exhaust gases out of cylinder, as shown here:
FUEL INTAKE:
As the piston finally bottoms out, the intake
port is uncovered. The piston's movement has
pressurized the mixture in the crankcase, so it
rushes into the cylinder, displacing the
remaining exhaust gases and filling the
cylinder with a fresh charge of fuel, as shown
here:
Note that in many two-stroke engines that use
a cross-flow design, the piston is shaped so
that the incoming fuel mixture doesn't simply
flow right over the top of the piston and out the
exhaust port.
THE COMPRESSION STROKE:
Now the momentum in the crankshaft starts driving the piston back
toward the spark plug for the compression stroke. As the air/fuel
mixture in the piston is compressed, a vacuum is created in the
crankcase. This vacuum opens the reed valve and sucks air/fuel/oil
in from the carburetor.
Once the piston makes it to the end of the compression stroke, the
spark plug fires again to repeat the cycle. It's called a two-stoke
engine because there is a compression stroke and then a
combustion stroke. In a four-stroke engine, there are separate
intake, compression, combustion and exhaust strokes.
You can see that the piston is really doing three different things in a
two-stroke engine:
On one side of the piston is the combustion chamber, where
the piston is compressing the air/fuel mixture and capturing the
energy released by the ignition of the fuel.
On the other side of the piston is the crankcase, where the
piston is creating a vacuum to suck in air/fuel from the
carburetor through the reed valve and then pressurizing the
crankcase so that air/fuel is forced into the combustion
chamber.
Meanwhile, the sides of the piston are acting like valves,
covering and uncovering the intake and exhaust ports drilled
into the side of the cylinder wall.

It's really pretty neat to see the piston doing so many different things!
That's what makes two-stroke engines so simple and lightweight.
If you have ever used a two-stroke engine, you know that you have to
mix special two-stroke oil in with the gasoline. Now that you
understand the two-stroke cycle you can see why. In a four-stroke
engine, the crankcase is completely separate from the combustion
chamber, so you can fill the crankcase with heavy oil to lubricate the
crankshaft bearings, the bearings on either end of the piston's
connecting rod and the cylinder wall. In a two-stroke engine, on the
other hand, the crankcase is serving as a pressurization chamber
to force air/fuel into the cylinder, so it can't hold a thick oil. Instead,
you mix oil in with the gas to lubricate the crankshaft, connecting rod
and cylinder walls. If you forget to mix in the oil, the engine isn't going
to last very long!

DISADVANTAGES OF TWO-STROKE:
You can now see that two-stroke engines have two important
advantages over four-stroke engines: They are simpler and lighter,
and they produce about twice as much power. So why do cars and
trucks use four-stroke engines? There are four main reasons:

Two-stroke engines don't last nearly as long as four-stroke
engines. The lack of a dedicated lubrication system means that
the parts of a two-stroke engine wear a lot faster.
Two-stroke oil is expensive, and you need about 4 ounces of it
per gallon of gas. You would burn about a gallon of oil every
1,000 miles if you used a two-stroke engine in a car.
Two-stroke engines do not use fuel efficiently, so you would get
fewer miles per gallon.
Two-stroke engines produce a lot of pollution -- so much, in fact,
that it is likely that you won't see them around too much longer.
The pollution comes from two sources.
The first is the combustion of the oil. The
oil makes all two-stroke engines smoky to
some extent, and a badly worn two-stroke
engine can emit huge clouds of oily
smoke. The second reason is less
obvious but can be seen in the following
figure:
Each time a new charge of air/fuel is loaded
into the combustion chamber, part of it leaks
out through the exhaust port. That's why you
see a sheen of oil around any two-stroke boat motor. The leaking
hydrocarbons from the fresh fuel combined with the leaking oil is a
real mess for the environment.
These disadvantages mean that two-stroke engines are used only in
applications where the motor is not used very often and a fantastic
power-to-weight ratio is important.
In the meantime, manufacturers have been working to shrink and
lighten four-stroke engines, and you can see that research coming to
market in a variety of new marine and lawn-care products.
HOW DIESEL TWO-STROKE ENGINES WORK:
The article How Diesel Engines Work describes the four-stroke diesel
engines commonly found in cars and trucks. The article How Two-
stroke Engines Work describes the small two-stroke engines found in
things like chain saws, mopeds and jet skis. It turns out that diesel
engine technology is often combined with a two-stroke cycle in the
huge diesel engines found in locomotives, large ships and generating
facilities.
UDERSTANDING THE CYCLE:
One big difference between two-stroke and four-stroke engines is the
amount of power the engine can produce. The spark plug fires twice
as often in a two-stroke engine -- once per every revolution of the
crankshaft, versus once for every two revolutions in a four-stroke
engine. This means that a two-stroke engine has the potential to
produce twice as much power as a four-stroke engine of the same
size.
The gasoline engine cycle, where gas and air are mixed and
compressed together, is not really a perfect match for the two-stroke
approach. The problem is that some unburned fuel leaks out each
time the cylinder is recharged with the air-fuel mixture.
It turns out that the diesel approach, which compresses only air and
then injects the fuel directly into the compressed air, is a much better
match with the two-stroke cycle. Many manufacturers of large diesel
engines therefore use this approach to create high-power engines.
The figure below shows the layout of a
typical two-stroke diesel engine:
At the top of the cylinder are typically
two or four exhaust valves that all
open at the same time. There is also
the diesel fuel injector (shown above in
yellow). The piston is elongated, as in
a gasoline two-stroke engine, so that it
can act as the intake valve. At the
bottom of the piston's travel, the piston
uncovers the ports for air intake. The
intake air is pressurized by a
turbocharger or a supercharger (light
blue). The crankcase is sealed and
contains oil as in a four-stroke engine.
The two-stroke diesel cycle goes like
this:
1. When the piston is at the top of
its travel, the cylinder contains
a charge of highly compressed air. Diesel fuel is sprayed into
the cylinder by the injector and immediately ignites because of
the heat and pressure inside the cylinder.
2. The pressure created by the combustion of the fuel drives the
piston downward. This is the power stroke.
3. As the piston nears the bottom of its stroke, all of the exhaust
valves open. Exhaust gases rush out of the cylinder, relieving
the pressure.
4. As the piston bottoms out, it uncovers the air intake ports.
Pressurized air fills the cylinder, forcing out the remainder of
the exhaust gases.
5. The exhaust valves close and the piston starts traveling back
upward, re-covering the intake ports and compressing the
fresh charge of air. This is the compression stroke.
6. As the piston nears the top of the cylinder, the cycle repeats
with step 1.
From this description, you can see the big difference between a
diesel two-stroke engine and a gasoline two-stroke engine: In the
diesel version, only air fills the cylinder, rather than gas and air mixed
together. This means that a diesel two-stroke engine suffers from
none of the environmental problems that plague a gasoline two-
stroke engine. On the other hand, a diesel two-stroke engine must
have a turbocharger or a supercharger, and this means that you will
never find a diesel two-stroke on a chain saw -- it would simply be too
expensive.
GENERAL MOTORS EMD ENGINES:
The General Motors EMD engine line is typical of the two-stroke
diesel breed. These engines were introduced in the 1930s and power
a large number of the diesel locomotives found in the United States.
There have been three successive series in the EMD line: the 567
series, the 645 series, and the 710 series. The numbers refer to the
number of cubic inches per cylinder, with a typical engine having 16
cylinders (for a total displacement on the order of 10,000 cubic
inches!). When you consider that a 5-liter (305-cubic-inch) engine is
considered to be very large in an automobile, you can see that one of
these EMD engines is massive!
Here are some of the specifications for the EMD 645E3 engine:
Cylinder diameter - 9-1/16 inches
Piston stroke - 10 inches
Displacement per cylinder - 654 cubic inches
Number of cylinders - 16 or 20
Compression ratio - 14.5:1
Exhaust valves per cylinder - 4
Engine weight -
16 cylinders: 34,526 pounds / 15,661 kg
20 cylinders: 40,144 pounds / 18,209 kg (The oil pan
alone weighs over a ton!)
Idle speed - 315 rotations per minute (rpm)
Full speed - 900 rpm
A typical horsepower rating for one of these engines is 4,300 hp!