9000 RPM. That’s how fast a modern sports car engine can rev.
I know that number, but I can’t quite visualize it. The math is simple: 9000 revolutions per minute is 150 per second.
The screen on my laptop doesn’t even refresh that often. 🤯
That crankshaft is spinning faster than the display you’re reading this on can draw a frame.
To help picture this, I built an animation: random.ma.ttias.be/boxermotor .
Turn the ignition , hold the gas pedal or the spacebar, and it revs up to the redline.
There are 4 engine layouts in there: an inline-4, a 60-degree V6, a boxer-6 and a flat-plane V8. Each one gets its own crankshaft geometry and firing order. The pistons should move the way that engine moves under the hood.
At full throttle the whole thing turns into a blur.
Kind of hard to even capture on video here. At 60fps the crank makes 2.5 full turns between frames, so all you capture is blur. If I could capture this at 150 fps, and hold it at full throttle, it would look like a static image, every frame capturing the same position.
So you can slow it down instead. Drop the time control to 1/50x and a single revolution crawls by, one piston at a time, giving you time to imagine doing this 150 times per second.
Combustion engines are amazing pieces of tech.
Have a play with it . It’s another one in the random tools collection of PWAs , which is where all these end up.