Great Resource for fans of internal combustion engines...

[RodRico]

Many folks may find the materials from USC Professor Paul Ronney's AME-436 class, "Energy and Propulsion," to be educational. He provides his lectures, problem sets, study guides, and so forth at

http://ronney.usc.edu/AME436/.

While the individual lectures are not available outside the USC network, the entire collection in one large (180 MB) file is available at

http://ronney.usc.edu/AME436/AME436-AllLectures.pdf

and the Excel spreadsheet he describes in Lecture 9 is available at

http://ronney.usc.edu/spreadsheets/AirCycles4Recips.xls

. The only thing lacking in his spreadsheet is a temperature variant value for the ratio of specific heats and the calculation of heat transfer (I can provide those calculations for anyone interested). There's a lot of interesting material in the lectures even for those uninterested in the math (just red the words and skip the math to get a qualitative sense).