Carburetor
device that mixes air and fuel for internal combustion engines
A carburetor (also spelled carburettor or carburetter) is a device used by a gasoline internal combustion engine to control and mix air and fuel entering the engine. The primary method of adding fuel to the intake air is through the Venturi effect or Bernoulli's principle or with a pitot tube in the main metering circuit, though various other components are also used to provide extra fuel or air in specific circumstances.
Since the 1990s, carburetors have been largely replaced by fuel injection for cars and trucks, but carburetors are still used by some small engines (e.g. lawnmowers, generators, and concrete mixers), motorcycles, and smaller outboard engines. In addition, they are still widely used on piston-engine–driven aircraft. Diesel engines have always used fuel injection instead of carburetors, as they do not compress an air-fuel mix and instead require fuel injection much later in the compression stroke.
Etymology
The term "carburetor" is derived from the English verb carburet, meaning "to charge with hydrocarbons"; in early motoring books the product of the carburetor is carburetted air, i.e. air charged with hydrocarbon vapour. This meaning superseded that from the late eighteenth century in which carburet was a noun for which we now use the word carbide. A carburetor charges the intake air with vapour from a hydrocarbon-based fuel, such as petrol or autogas.
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This entry incorporates text from “Carburetor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.