Generalized Balance of Inline, Vee and Opposed Piston Engines

This is a technological assessment of alternate piston engine cylinder and crankshaft configuration alternatives. The balance characteristics of automotive engines have been generalized here in terms of four mathematical expressions which describe the unbalanced forces and moments of a piston engine as functions of the number of cylinders, vee angle, crankshaft configuration and cylinder bank offset. These unique relations permit any inline, vee and opposed engine to be evaluated for balance. And, this made it possible to identify all of the inherently balanced configurations with uniform radially spaced crank throws, for any cylinder vee angle and for any crank configuration with up to 24 cylinders.