Are diesel engines more efficient than gas engines?

Tractors are the workhorses of contemporary agriculture and even for good reason — they’re powerful, versatile and sturdy. The heart and soul of these legendary machines is of course the engine, and over time designers have replaced the unpredictable and dangerous steam engines with car engines that are far more powerful, efficient and reliable. But exactly how will they work? Continue reading to discover!

Brief Good reputation for Tractor Engines

When tractors were first developed, they used enormous steam engines which were notoriously unreliable and hard to maintain. They were phased out round the turn of the Twentieth century and substituted for car engines that were smaller sized but still powerful and ran on the number of fuels including kerosene, ethanol and gasoline. By the 1960s many of these engines were eliminated in support of more efficient internal combustion engines that ran on diesel now, biodiesel.

How Tractor Engines Work

Diesel engines have grown to be the predominant power behind modern tractors because they possess the highest thermal efficiency of any internal or external combustion engine, thanks to their higher than normal compression ratio. Unlike gasoline engines, the diesel engines in tractors use highly compressed hot air to ignite the fuel rather than spark plugs.

Once air is pulled into the combustion chamber, it is compressed to 580 pounds per square inch (PSI), which heats the environment to some temperature of 1022 ?F (550?C). At this time, fuel is injected into the combustion chamber using an injector that disperses the little droplets of fuel evenly through the chamber. These tiny droplets of diesel fuel then vaporize once they come in contact with the hot, compressed air, which in turn causes an immediate expansion of combustion gases that drive the engine’s pistons downward, creating power that turns the crankshaft from the tractor.

In which the Power Goes

Tractor engines generate an enormous amount of power – anywhere from 18 to 575 horsepower or more. But that power does greater than simply move the tractor’s wheels. One of the reasons why tractor sales continue to climb all over the world is that these machines are so versatile, because of remarkable ability to transfer the power using their massive engines. This power can be harnessed to operate stationary equipment using PTO or power remove systems and it can even be used to supply hydraulic fluid and electrical power to tractor attachments that are pulled behind or alongside the tractor like mowers, swathers, balers and plows.