Abstract
Generators are widely used across the world as portable power units in case of power outages, used for emergency services and are also used in rural areas without access to electricity. The majority of commercially available generators use internal combustion engines designed as automobile engines with little or no optimization for use in generators. With operating conditions vastly different than that of automobile engines, they can be re-designed to operate much more efficiently as generator engines. The development objective here was to design a low cost, 1.6L, lean burn, internal combustion engine which minimizes heat losses, time losses and frictional losses to improve thermal efficiency. Various high swirl, high squish, easily CNC’d combustion chambers were created in the re-design process. A computer model was used to provide insight into the trade-off between time losses and heat losses. A maximum brake thermal efficiency of 37.2% was achieved.