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A flat engine is a piston engine where the cylinders are located on either side of a central crankshaft. Flat engines are also known as horizontally opposed engines, however this is distinct from the less common opposed-piston engine design, whereby each cylinder has two pistons sharing a central combustion chamber.
Similar to U engines, H engines consist of two separate flat engines joined by gears or chains. H engines have been produced with between 4 and 24 cylinders. An opposed-piston engine is similar to a flat engine in that pairs of pistons are co-axial but rather than sharing a crankshaft, instead share a single combustion chamber per pair of ...
A straight engine is easier to build than an equivalent flat engine or V engine, as it uses one cylinder head rather than two. Inline engines are also narrower than flat engines or V engines; however, they are longer and can be taller. The engine balance characteristics of a straight engine depend on the number of cylinders and the firing interval.
A boxer-style flat-six engine is able to have perfect primary and secondary balance.As in other six-cylinder engines, the overlapping of the power strokes of the different cylinders (with a firing interval of 120 degrees in a four-stroke engine) reduces the pulsating of the power delivery relative to that of similar engines with fewer cylinders.
This particularly affects straight and V-engines with a 180° or single-plane crankshaft in which pistons in neighbouring cylinders simultaneously pass through opposite dead centre positions. While it might be expected that a 4-cylinder inline engine would have perfect balance, a net secondary imbalance remains.
The most common type of flat-twin engine is the boxer-twin engine, where both pistons move inwards and outwards at the same time. The flat-twin design was patented by Karl Benz in 1896 and the first production flat-twin engine was used in the Lanchester 8 hp Phaeton car released in 1900.