Hello AutoZoned,
I was the engine and drivetrain leader for a Formula SAE team at a college with very little internal combustion engine or automotive resources. The closest research or expertise was in the combustion lab where they were performing fuel studies, but it was mostly applicable to jet engines. So I embarked on a self-inflicted curriculum. The disadvantages of self teaching are numerous but the price can't be beat. This is far from a replacement for a course or structured instruction but it allowed me to make the jump from being a backyard mechanic motorhead to thinking about engines as an engineer and starting to understand the fundamental principles behind them. My friends working on chassis and suspension took Claude Rouelle's Optimum G course but I found no readily available and affordable equivalent for engine design and tuning.
The main drawback to self teaching is that you don't know what you don't know. If you're just googling and reading disconnected bits of information you might be missing an entire aspect of engines. For this reason I focused on textbooks; by reading through the entire book it's a lot harder to entirely miss an aspect. My knowledge was certainly shallow in some areas (like vibration, as you may notice in my other recent posts on this board
![[smile]](/data/assets/smilies/smile.gif "[smile] [smile]")
) but I at least had a good overall knowledge and I haven't embarrassed myself while working at an engine design company for the last few months.
The books I recommended, in approximate order:
Four-Stroke Performance and Tuning by A Graham Bell: This book is really targeted at an engine enthusiast, not an engineer. But for someone who only knows the basics of engines it's very readable but also starts to introduce some math and physics.
Design and Simulation of Four Stroke Engines by Gordon Blair: This is a pretty popular book and it'll cover very similar topics to Bell's book but much more in depths. It focuses on modification and performance tuning of an existing engine as opposed to ground up engine design. Lots of intake, exhaust, and some basic combustion topics.
Internal Combustion Engine Fundamentals by J Heywood: Despite 'fundamentals' in the name this is a more advanced book. It focuses a lot on combustion dynamics and the thermodynamic properties of engines.
These three books give a good base in the prime motivating aspect of engines, the combustion and pumping process. If you start here it'll give you a good basis for getting into the more advanced topics that are necessary for ground up engine design, like structure, balance, vibration, and the like.
