Six-stroke engine

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The term six-stroke engine has been applied to a number of alternative internal combustion engine designs that attempt to improve on traditional two-stroke and four-stroke engines. Claimed advantages may include increased fuel efficiency, reduced mechanical complexity, and/or reduced emissions. These engines can be divided into two groups based on the number of pistons that contribute to the six strokes.

In the single-piston designs, the engine captures the heat lost from the four-stroke Otto cycle or Diesel cycle and uses it to drive an additional power and exhaust stroke of the piston in the same cylinder in an attempt to improve fuel efficiency and/or assist with engine cooling. The pistons in this type of six-stroke engine go up and down three times for each injection of fuel. These designs use either steam or air as the working fluid for the additional power stroke.^[1]

The designs in which the six strokes are determined by the interactions between two pistons are more diverse. The pistons may be opposed in a single cylinder or may reside in separate cylinders. Usually, one cylinder makes two strokes while the other makes four strokes, giving six piston movements per cycle. The second piston may be used to replace the valve mechanism of a conventional engine, which may reduce mechanical complexity and enable an increased compression ratio by eliminating hotspots that would otherwise limit compression. The second piston may also be used to increase the expansion ratio, decoupling it from the compression ratio. Increasing the expansion ratio in this way can increase thermodynamic efficiency in a similar manner to the Miller or Atkinson cycle.