Inspiration..
This web-app was inspired by our group's interest in internal combustion engines. We are a group of Mechanical Engineering students and in our major course dealing with Thermodynamics, Heat Transfer, and Internal Combustion Engines, it has been difficult for us to visualize the effects of various inputs on an engine's total performance. We were inspired to create an app in MATLAB that would help us solve this problem. MATLAB was chosen as the programming language for this app since MATLAB was a part of our standard curriculum for Mechanical Engineering.
What it does
The Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) Analyzer calculates mean effective pressures, efficiency, and work produced given compression ratio, bore, stroke, connecting rod length, and displacement volume. A pressure-volume or p-v diagram is also made for the combustion cycle, and each of the four strokes (intake, compression, combustion, exhaust) are outlined in the p-v diagram.
How we built it
We used MATLAB App Designer to develop our app.
Challenges we ran into
A challenge we ran into was getting started on how to approach our problem. Before this weekend, we have never heard of MATLAB's App Designer tool. With some familiarity with GUI, we decided that this was the route to take as it allows for a clean and easy to use interface. By watching some videos on YouTube and learning from the Mathworks website, we became familiar with this new tool.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud to have completed a project that we hope engineers will find useful. We're also proud to have learned a new tool.
What we learned
We learned how to use MATLAB's App Designer.
What's next for Internal Combustion Engine Analyzer
We can add more output parameters and fix up some bugs in our program. We can also make the graph more dynamic.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.