Air-breathing combustion engines are combustion engines that use the oxygen in atmospheric air to oxidise ('burn') the fuel carried, rather than carrying an oxidiser, as in a rocket. Theoretically, this should result in a better specific impulse than for rocket engines.
A continuous stream of air flows through the Air-breathing engine. This air is compressed, mixed with fuel, ignited and expelled as the exhaust gas.
- Examples
Typical air-breathing engines include:
- Reciprocating engine
- Steam engine
- Gas turbine
- airbreathing jet engine
- Turbo-propeller engine
- Pulse detonation engine
- Pulse jet
- Ramjet
- Scramjet
- Liquid air cycle engine/Reaction Engines SABRE.
Read more about this topic: Engine, Heat Engine, Combustion Engine
Famous quotes containing the words combustion and/or engines:
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Lamentings heard i’ th’ air, strange screams of death,
And prophesying with accents terrible
Of dire combustion and confused events,
New-hatched to the woeful time.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“America is like one of those old-fashioned six-cylinder truck engines that can be missing two sparkplugs and have a broken flywheel and have a crankshaft that’s 5000 millimeters off fitting properly, and two bad ball-bearings, and still runs. We’re in that kind of situation. We can have substantial parts of the population committing suicide, and still run and look fairly good.”
—Thomas McGuane (b. 1939)