Designing a Connecting Rod for an Internal Combustion Engine

Connecting rod is one of the most essential parts in a common internal combustion engine that converts the reciprocating movement of the piston to the rotary motion of the Crankshaft. The material used in fabricating the connecting rod shall be capable of enduring high tensile and compressive forces and resistant to fatigue failure due to the high difference between these forces. Another critical aspect of the connecting rods is their resistance to buckling. The aim of this paper is to design the connecting rod of a common internal combustion engine in a way that all critical performance aspects are compensated for through proper means of mechanical design. It shall be noted that in designing connecting rods, pressure vs. angle of the crankshaft plots is used. A MATLAB code will be developed for the design procedure and a finite element study will be done on the designed connecting rod