Encyclopedia of Global Resources part 68 provides a wide variety of perspectives on both traditional and more recent views of Earth's resources. It serves as a bridge connecting the domains of resource exploitation, environmentalism, geology, and biology, and it explains their interrelationships in terms that students and other nonspecialists can understand. The articles in this set are extremely diverse, with articles covering soil, fisheries, forests, aluminum, the Industrial Revolution, the . Department of the Interior, the hydrologic cycle, glass, and placer mineral deposits. . | 618 Internal combustion engine Global Resources Standard Four-Stroke Internal Combustion Engine Intake port Intake Compression Ignition Exhaust port Expansion and Exhaust A generalized depiction of the four-stroke internal combustion engine. Intake Air enters the cylinder and mixes with gasoline vapor. Compression The cylinder is sealed and the piston moves upward to compress the air-fuel mixture. Ignition The spark plug ignites the mixture creating pressure that drives the piston downward. Expansion exhaust The burned gases exit the cylinder. in the postwar era and added to the demand for petroleum fuels. These diverse uses of the internal combustion engine and its dependability made this design a favorite in the marketplace for more than one century despite its inefficiency and the fact that it polluted the environment. Resource Use The demand and consumption of petroleum as a fuel grew with the increased uses of the internal combustion engine in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For example in the United States gasoline use increased more than tenfold from 1910 to 1950 as Americans embraced the car culture and it tripled between 1950 and 2000 an era of suburban growth and multiple-car families. Gasoline consumption far outpaced domestic petroleum production and the United States tripled the amount of oil it imported in the short time period from 1967 to 1973. As of 2010 the United States continued to import more than 60 percent of the petroleum it consumed each year. Although the internal combustion engine was the pre eminent mobile power source of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries its use of nonrenewable energy resources and the pollutants it released generated a growing interest in finding alternative sources of reliable mobile power. H. J. Eisenman Further Reading Black Edwin. Internal Combustion How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives. New York St. Martin s Press 2006. Cummins .
