Sentence examples for piston from inspiring English sources
noun
A solid disk or cylinder that fits inside a hollow cylinder, and moves under pressure (as in an engine) or displaces fluid (as in a pump)
And smaller robotic beasties are hopping, crawling and running into action, as three models built by Boston Dynamics, a spin-out from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MITT), illustrate.By jabbing the ground with a gas-powered piston, the Sand Flea can leap through a window, or onto a roof nine metres up.
For a liquid piston to work, its surface must be stable in the face of rapidly changing pressures.In this section Cool coils An engine made of water How (and why) to find a needle in a haystack ReprintsThis is difficult to achieve, but apparently not impossible.
And making a good seal between piston and shaft will hardly be trivial.
But it suffers from a fatal flaw, which is that the tips of the rotating piston on which the device relies tend to become worn.
What if do not laugh the piston were made of water?The need for the parts of an engine to fit together tightly enough to stop hot gases seeping where they should not, and yet not so tightly that they rub on each other in a way that wears them out, is a constant bane of engine designers.
If all does not go well, another attempt to dethrone the traditional piston engine will no doubt come along in due course.
Others who have looked at making electric aircraft for flight training believe it is possible to produce them at a price that is competitive with similar-sized piston-engined aircraft.
Both designs can thus be powered by wood, dried animal dung or more or less anything else that will burn.The second advantage is that a free-piston engine suffers little wear and tear, so it should be able to run for a decade or more without servicing.
Both have previously built and deployed satellite-cooling systems, and both now plan to use free-piston engines to drive electricity generators.From a user's point of view the Stirling approach has two advantages.
New developments would make cooling systems greener still because they would use less power.Most air-conditioners using refrigerants consume lots of electricity because they employ mechanical compressors, which are piston-like machinery that squeeze the heated vapours.
One is at Sunpower, an American company founded by William Beale, the principal inventor of the free-piston design.
