Do this with a clean towel, toothbrush, or your hand if pressed for time. Expect to see it on more and more cars as time goes on. When you’re home sick with a cold or flu, there’s nothing more soothing than a mug of tea garnished with a generous dollop of honey and a hefty slice of lemon. Incorporating labradorite into your home décor is another way to benefit from the stone’s healing properties and unique energies. If you invest in renewable energy for your home such as solar, wind, geothermal, fuel cells or battery storage technology, you may qualify for an annual residential clean energy tax credit. But since many of them can achieve well over 40 miles per gallon (17 kilometers per liter) on the highway, the driver will need to pay for that fuel a lot less often. The benefit to the overhead cam setup is that it allows for more intake and exhaust valves, meaning fuel, air and exhaust can move more freely through the engine, adding power. Sometimes, direct injection engines can exhibit the buildup of carbon deposits on the intake valves, which could cause reliability issues.

Despite these issues, direct injection is the hot new technology in the automotive world right now. Some car tuners have expressed difficulty with modifying direct injection engines as well. In this next section, we’ll talk about how camshafts have revolutionized engine design. The term refers to the number of overhead camshafts above each cylinder in the engine. Long-term exposure to chemical hazards such as silica dust, engine exhausts, tobacco smoke, and lead (among others) have been shown to increase risk of heart disease, stroke, and high blood pressure. We’ll talk about how engine computers have revolutionized design in this next section. Cars have become increasingly computerized since the first on-board diagnostic (OBD) computers were added in the 1980s. That’s the computer that’s responsible for the “check engine” light on your dashboard. By making the engine run more efficiently, engine computers can result in greater fuel efficiency and easier diagnosis of problems. There are times when an engine requires more air flow, like during hard acceleration, but a traditional engine often does not allow enough air to flow, resulting in lower performance.

Camshafts are part of your car’s valvetrain, which is a system that controls the flow of fuel and air into the cylinders. A mechanic can plug a computer into the OBD port and get a sense of your car’s problem areas. That way, your baby won’t get too cold during the bathing process. For many decades cars primarily had OHV engines, meaning overhead valves, also called “pushrods.” Pushrods are driven by camshafts inside the engine block. That’s why modern cars have everything regulated by an on-board computer called an engine control unit, or ECU. You don’t have to write a great first draft. They can’t use OBD to immediately know what’s wrong with your car, but it gives them a great starting point. My friend still defends her grandma’s crocheted cloths – you know the ones I’m talking about? Today the majority of all new small engines use aluminum instead, though many large V8 engines still use iron blocks. Next up: Let’s learn why diesel engines aren’t the smoky, noisy, low-power oil burners of the past. Today’s engines use a low-sulfur form of diesel fuel, and systems within the car help eliminate particle matter and excess pollution.

But they also make engines far more complicated, and can make them tricky for weekend mechanics to work on. Hybrids were an obscure a decade ago, but now everyone knows how they work — an electric motor is partnered with a traditional gasoline engine in order to achieve high fuel economy numbers, but without the “range anxiety” of an electric engine, where the driver always wonders what will happen when a charge runs out. Diesel engines have some drawbacks, mainly their low RPM level and the higher cost of diesel fuel. Aluminum does have some drawbacks, however. Many early aluminum block engines had problems with cylinders warping, leading to concerns over durability. Those problems have been largely solved, however, and aluminum has clearly asserted itself as the future of engines due to its weight-saving properties. Diesels have never been big sellers in the United States. The EPA then project that, if all states complied and met those targets, US power-plant emissions would fall roughly 20 percent below 2012 levels by 2030 – or about 32 percent below 2005 levels.