Diesel engine and history

The steam engine is a type of internal combustion engine. It is a compression ignition engine, in which the fuel ignites as it is injected into the engine. By contrast, in the gasoline engine the fuel is mixed first and then ignited by a spark plug. Also, diesels generally have high compression ratios, to enable compression ignition, whereas in gasoline-burning engines, compression ignition is undesirable.

The engine operates using the diesel cycle.

The engine is named after German engineer Rudolf Diesel, who invented it in 1892 based on the hot bulb engine and received the patent on February 23, 1893. Diesel intended the engine to use a variety of fuels including coal dust and peanut oil. He demonstrated it at the 1900 Exposition Universelle (World's Fair) using peanut oil.



Early history timeline

* 1862: Nicolaus Otto develops his coal gas engine, similar to a modern gasoline engine.

* 1891: Herbert Akroyd Stuart, of Bletchley perfects his oil engine, and leases rights to Hornsby of England to build engines. They build the first cold start, compression ignition engines.

* 1892: Hornsby engine No. 101 is built and installed in a waterworks. It is now in the MAN truck museum in Northern England.

* 1892: Rudolf Diesel develops his Carnot heat engine type motor which burnt powdered coal dust. He is employed by refrigeration genius Carl von Linde, then Munich iron manufacturer MAN AG, and later by the Sulzer engine company of Switzerland. He borrows ideas from them and leaves a legacy with all firms.

* 1892: John Froelich builds his first oil engine powered farm tractor.

* 1894: Witte, Reid, and Fairbanks start building oil engines with a variety of ignition systems.

* 1896: Hornsby builds diesel tractors and railway engines.

* 1897: Winton produces and drives the first US built gas automobile; he later builds diesel plants.

* 1897: Mirrlees, Watson & Yaryan build the first British diesel engine under license from Rudolf Diesel. This is now displayed in the Science Museum at South Kensington, London.

* 1898: Busch installs a Rudolf Diesel type engine in his brewery in St. Louis. It is the first in the United States. Rudolf Diesel perfects his compression start engine, patents, and licences it. This engine, pictured above, is in a German museum.

* 1899: Diesel licences his engine to builders Burmeister & Wain, Krupp, and Sulzer, who become famous builders.

* 1902: F. Rundlof invents the two-stroke crankcase, scavenged hot bulb engine.

* 1902: A company named Forest City [1] start manufacturing diesel generators.

* 1903: Ship Gjoa transits the ice-filled Northwest Passage, aided with a Dan kerosene engine.

* 1904: French build the first diesel submarine, the Z.

* 1908: Bolinder-Munktell starts building two stroke hot-bulb engines.

* 1912: First diesel ship MS Selandia is built. SS Fram, polar explorer Amundsen’s flagship, is converted to a AB Atlas diesel.

* 1913: Fairbanks Morse starts building its Y model semi-diesel engine. US Navy submarines use NELSECO units.

* 1914: German U-Boats are powered by MAN diesels. War service proves engine's reliability.

* 1920s: Fishing fleets convert to oil engines. Atlas-Imperial of Oakland, Union, and Lister diesels appear.

* 1924: First diesel trucks appear.

* 1928: Canadian National Railways employ a diesel shunter in their yards.

* 1930s: Clessie Cummins starts with Dutch diesel engines, and then builds his own into trucks and a Duesenberg luxury car at the Daytona speedway.

* 1930s: Caterpillar starts building diesels for their tractors.

* 1933: Citroën introduced the Rosalie, a passenger car with the world’s first commercially available diesel engine developed with Harry Ricardo.

* 1934: General Motors starts a GM diesel research facility. It builds diesel railroad engines—The Pioneer Zephyr—and goes on to found the General Motors Electro-Motive Division, which becomes important building engines for landing craft and tanks in the Second World War. GM then applies this knowledge to market control with its famous Green Leakers for buses and railroad engines.

* 1936: Mercedes-Benz builds the 260D diesel car. A.T.S.F inaugurates the diesel train Super Chief.

* 1936: Airship Hindenburg is powered by diesel engines.

Hot bulb engine

The hot bulb engine is a type of internal combustion engine; more specifically, it is a compression ignition engine, in which the fuel is ignited by being suddenly exposed to high temperature and the pressure of a compressed gas, rather than by a separate source of ignition, such as a spark plug, as is the case in the gasoline engine.

It was invented by Herbert Akroyd Stuart in the end of the 19th century. The first prototypes were built in 1886 and production started in 1891 by Richard Hornsby & Sons of Grantham, Lincolnshire, England under the title Hornsby Akroyd Patent Oil Engine under licence. It was later developed in USA by the German emigrants Miez and Weiss by combining it with the two-stroke engine developed by Joseph Day. Similar engines, for agricultural and marine use, were built by Bolinder in Sweden. Bolinder is now part of the Volvo group.

Akroyd-Stuart's compression ignition engine (compared to spark-ignition) was invented two years earlier than Rudolf Diesel's better-known engine working on similar principles.

The engines were usually one cylinder, four-stroke units, although following Miez & Weiss' developments in the USA, 2-stroke versions were constructed.




Operation and working cycle

The hot-bulb engine shares its basic layout with nearly all other internal combustion engines, in that it has a piston inside a cylinder connected to a flywheel via a connecting rod and crankshaft. The flow of gases through the engine is controlled by valves. The majority operate on the standard 4-stroke cycle of an Induction Stroke, a Compression Stroke, a Power Stroke and an Exhaust Stroke.

The main feature of the hot-bulb engine is the vaporiser or hot-bulb, a chamber usually cast into the engine block and attached to the main cylinder by a narrow opening. Prior to starting the engine from cold, this vaporiser is heated externally by a blow-lamp or slow-burning wick (on later models sometimes electric heating or pyrotechnics was used) for as much as half an hour. The engine is then turned over, usually by hand but sometimes by compressed air or an electric motor.

Air is drawn into the cylinder through the intake valve as the piston descends (The Induction Stroke). During the same stroke, fuel is injected into the hot-bulb by a mechanical jerk-pump through a nozzle. Through the action of the injector and the heat of the hot-bulb, the fuel instantly vapourises. The air in the cylinder then forced through the top of the cylinder as the piston rises (The Compression Stroke), through the opening into the hot-bulb, where it is compressed and therefore its temperature rises. The vaporised fuel mixes with the compressed air and ignites due to the heat of the compressed air and the heat applied to the hot-bulb prior to starting. The fuel ignites, driving the piston down (The Power Stroke). The piston's action is converted to a rotary motion by the crankshaft which drives the flywheel, to which equipment can be attached for work to be performed. The flywheel also conserves momentum to turn the engine over the three strokes when power is not being produced. The piston rises again and the exhaust gases are expelled through the exhaust valve (The Exhaust Stroke). The cycle then starts again.

Once the engine is running, the heat of compression and ignition maintains the hot-bulb at the necessary temperature and the blow-lamp or other heat source can be removed. From this point the engine requires no external heat and requires only a supply of air, fuel oil and lubricating oil to run. The fact that the engine could be left unattended for long periods whilst running made hot bulb engines popular choices for powering generators and pumps.




Advantages

At the time the hot-bulb engine was invented, its great attractions were its economy, simplicity and ease of operation in comparison to the steam engine, then the dominant source of power in industry. Steam engines achieved an average thermal efficiency (the amount of heat generated that is actually turned into useful work) of around 6%. Hot-bulb engines could easily achieve 12% thermal efficiency.

The hot-bulb engine is much simpler than the steam engine to construct and operate. Steam engines require at least one person to monitor the boiler and add water and fuel as needed. If fitted with automatic lubrication systems and a governor to control the fuel supply, a hot-bulb engine could be left unattended for hours at a time once running.

Another attraction was their safety. A steam engine, with its exposed fire and hot boiler, steam pipes and working cylinder could not be used in flammable conditions such as munitions factories or fuel refineries. Hot-bulb engine also produced cleaner exhaust fumes. A big danger with the steam engine was that if the boiler pressure grew too high and the safety valve failed, a highly dangerous explosion could occur (although this was a relatively rare occurrence by the time the hot-bulb engine was invented). A more common problem was that if the water level in the boiler of a steam engine was allowed to drop too low, the internal structure of the boiler could collapse or melt, also causing dangerous release of high pressure gas. If a hot bulb engine ran out of fuel, it would simply stop. The cooling water was usually a closed circuit, so no water loss would occur unless there was a leak. If the cooling water ran low, the engine would seize through overheating- a major problem, but it carried no danger of explosion.

Compared to both steam and gasoline (petrol) engines, hot-bulb engines are simpler and therefore have less potential problems. There is no electrical system as found on a petrol engine, and no external boiler and steam system as on a steam engine.

A big attraction with the hot-bulb engine was its ability to run on a wide range of fuels. Even poor-burning fuels could be used since a combination of vaporiser- and compression-ignition meant that such fuels could be made to combust. The usual fuel used was Fuel Oil, similar to modern-day diesel, but natural gas, kerosene, paraffin, crude oil, vegetable oil, creosote and even in some cases coal dust were used in hot-bulb engines. This made the hot-bulb engine very cheap to run, since it could be run on cheaply available fuels. Some operators even ran engines on used engine oil, thus providing almost free power. Recently, this multi-fuel ability has led to an interest in using hot bulb engines in developing nations where they can be run on locally produced biofuel.

Due to the lengthy pre-heating time, hot-bulb engines were nearly always guaranteed to start quickly, even in extremely cold condtions. This made them popular choices in cold regions such as Canada and Scandinavia, where steam engines were not viable but early gasoline and diesel engines could not be relied on to operate.




Uses

The reliability of hot-bulb engine, their ability to run on many fuels and the fact that they can be left running for hours or days at a time made them extremely popular with agricultural and forestry users, where they were used for pumping and powering milling, sawing and threshing machinery. Hot-bulb engines were used on road-rollers and tractors.

J.V. Svensons Motorfabrikk, i Augustendal in Sweden used hot bulb engined in their Typ 1 motor plough, produced from 1912 to 1925. Munktells Mekaniska Värkstads AB, in Eskilstuna, Sweden, produced agricultural tractors with hot bulb engines from 1913 onwards. Heinrich Lanz Mannheim AG, in Mannheim, Germany, started to use hot bulb engines in 1921, in the Lanz Bulldog HL. Other well known tractor manufacturers that used bulb engines were Landini in Italy, HSCS in Hungary and SFV in France.

A limitation of the design of the engine was that it could only run over quite a narrow (and slow) speed band, typically 50-150 R.P.M.. This made the hot-bulb engine difficult to adapt to automotive uses other than vehicles such as tractors, where speed was not a major requirement. This limitation was of little consequence for stationary applications, where the hot-bulb engine was very popular.

Owing to the lengthy pre-heating time, hot-bulb engines only found favour with users who needed to run engines for long periods of time, where the pre-heating process only represented a small percentage of the overall running period. This included marine use (especially in fishing boats), electricity generation (especially in remote areas where coal was not easily available for steam engines) and pumping duties.

The engines were also used in areas where the fire of a steam engine would be an unacceptable fire risk. Akroyd-Stuart developed the world's first oil-engined locomotive (the 'Lachesis') for the Woolwich Arsenal, where the use of locomotives had previously been impossible due to the risk. Hot-bulb engines proved very popular for industrial engines in the early 20th century, but lacked the power to be used in anything larger.




Replacement

From around 1910, the diesel engine was improved dramatically, with more power being available at greater efficiencies than the hot-bulb engine could manage (Diesel engines can achieve nearly 50% efficiency if designed with maximum economy in mind). Diesel engines offered greater power for a given engine size due to the more efficient combustion method (they had no hot-bulb, relying purely on compression-ignition) and greater ease of use as they required no pre-heating.

The hot-bulb engine was limited in its scope in terms of speed and overall power-to-size ratio. To make a hot-bulb engine capable of powering a ship or locomotive, it would have been prohibitively large and heavy. The hot-bulb engines used in Landini tractors were as much as 20-litres in capacity for relatively low power outputs. Hot-bulb engines are difficult to make in multi-cylinder versions as well as creating even combustion throughout the multiple hot-bulbs is a complex business. The hot-bulb engine's low compression ratio in comparison to diesel engines limited its efficiency, power output and speed. Most hot-bulb engines could run at a maximum speed of around 100 R.P.M., whilst by the 1930s diesel engines capable of 2,000 R.P.M. were being built. Also, due to the design of hot bulb and the limitatations of current technology in regards to the injector system, most hot-bulb engines were single-speed engines, running at a fixed speed, or in a very narrow speed range. Diesel engines can be designed to operate over a much wider speed range, making them more versatile. This made these medium-sized diesels a very popular choice for use in generator sets, replacing the hot-bulb engine as the engine of choice for small-scale power generation. The Hot tube engine addresses the speed limitation and gave great flexibility in operation, although the solution induced a source of weakness in the design.

With the development of small-capacity, high-speed diesel engines in the 1930s and 1940s, hot-bulb engines fell dramatically out of favour. The last large-scale manufacturer of hot-bulb engines stopped producing them in the 1950s and they are now virtually extinct in commercial use, except in very remote areas of the developing world.

Ignoring the obvious differences (electrical heating, differing fuels, high RPMs - at least in the small model aircraft types) the modern Glow Plug engine could be considered the latest incarnation of these "hot spot" ignition based engines.




Differences from the Diesel Engine

The hot-bulb engine is often confused with the diesel engine, and it is true that the two engines are very similar. Aside from the obvious lack of a hot-bulb vaporiser in the diesel engine, the main differences are that:

* The hot-bulb engine uses both compression-ignition and the heat retained in the vaporiser to ignite the fuel.

* The diesel engine uses just compression-ignition to ignite the fuel, and it operates at pressures many times higher than the hot-bulb engine.

Due to the much greater and longer-term success of the diesel engine, today hot-bulb engines are sometimes called 'semi-diesels' because they partly use compression-ignition in their cycle.


There is also a detail difference in the timing of the fuel injection process:

* In the hot-bulb engine, fuel is injected into the vapouriser during the Induction Stroke as air is drawn into the cylinder.

* In the diesel engine, fuel is injected into the cylinder in the final stages of the Compression Stroke.

However, Diesel's original engine design used compressed air to blast the fuel into the cylinder. This complex and heavy system limited the speed the engine could run at and the minimum size a diesel engine could be built to. This was needed to inject fuel under sufficient pressure for it to enter the highly compressed air in the cylinder. In hot-bulb engines fuel is injected before compression takes place, allowing a lighter, more accurate injection system to be used. Only when Akroyd-Stuart's mechanical pump-and-injector system that he developed for his hot-bulb engine was adapted by Robert Bosch for use in diesel engines (by making the system run at a much higher pressure) were high-speed diesel engines practical.

History Of Internal Combustion Engines

The first internal combustion engines did not have compression, but ran on what air/fuel mixture could be sucked or blown in during the first part of the intake stroke. The most significant distinction between modern internal combustion engines and the early designs is the use of compression and in particular of in-cylinder compression.

* 1509: Leonardo da Vinci described a compression-less engine. (His description may not imply that the idea was original with him or that it was actually built.)

* 1673: Christiaan Huygens described a compression-less engine.

* 1780's: Alessandro Volta built a toy electric pistol in which an electric spark exploded a mixture of air and hydrogen, firing a cork from the end of the gun.

* 17th century: English inventor Sir Samuel Morland used gunpowder to drive water pumps.

* 1794: Robert Street built a compression-less engine whose principle of operation would dominate for nearly a century.

* 1806: Swiss engineer François Isaac de Rivaz built an internal combustion engine powered by a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen.

* 1823: Samuel Brown patented the first internal combustion engine to be applied industrially. It was compression-less and based on what Hardenberg calls the "Leonardo cycle," which, as this name implies, was already out of date at that time. Just as today, early major funding, in an area where standards had not yet been established, went to the best showmen sooner than to the best workers.

* 1824: French physicist Sadi Carnot established the thermodynamic theory of idealized heat engines. This scientifically established the need for compression to increase the difference between the upper and lower working temperatures, but it is not clear that engine designers were aware of this before compression was already commonly used. It may have misled designers who tried to emulate the Carnot cycle in ways that were not useful.

* 1826 April 1: The American Samuel Morey received a patent for a compression-less "Gas Or Vapor Engine".

* 1838: a patent was granted to William Barnet (English). This was the first recorded suggestion of in-cylinder compression. He apparently did not realize its advantages, but his cycle would have been a great advance if developed enough.

* 1854: The Italians Eugenio Barsanti and Felice Matteucci patented the first working efficient internal combustion engine in London (pt. Num. 1072) but did not get into production with it. It was similar in concept to the successful Otto Langen indirect engine, but not so well worked out in detail.

* 1860: Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir (1822 - 1900) produced a gas-fired internal combustion engine closely similar in appearance to a horizontal double-acting steam beam engine, with cylinders, pistons, connecting rods, and flywheel in which the gas essentially took the place of the steam. This was the first internal combustion engine to be produced in numbers. His first engine with compression shocked itself apart.

* 1862: Nikolaus Otto designed an indirect-acting free-piston compression-less engine whose greater efficiency won the support of Langen and then most of the market, which at that time, was mostly for small stationary engines fueled by lighting gas.

* 1870: In Vienna Siegfried Marcus put the first mobile gasoline engine on a handcart.

* 1876: Nikolaus Otto working with Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach developed a practical four-stroke cycle (Otto cycle) engine. The German courts, however, did not hold his patent to cover all in-cylinder compression engines or even the four stroke cycle, and after this decision in-cylinder compression became universal.

* 1879: Karl Benz, working independently, was granted a patent for his internal combustion engine, a reliable two-stroke gas engine, based on Nikolaus Otto's design of the four-stroke engine. Later Benz designed and built his own four-stroke engine that was used in his automobiles, which became the first automobiles in production.

* 1882: James Atkinson invented the Atkinson cycle engine. Atkinson’s engine had one power phase per revolution together with different intake and expansion volumes making it more efficient than the Otto cycle.

* 1891 - Herbert Akroyd-Stuart builds his oil engine leasing rights to Hornsby of England to build engines. They build the first cold start, compression ignition engines. In 1892 they install the first ones in a water pumping station.

* 1892: Rudolf Diesel develops his Carnot heat engine type motor burning powdered coal dust.

* 1893 February 23: Rudolf Diesel received a patent for the diesel engine.

* 1896: Karl Benz invented the boxer engine, also known as the horizontally opposed engine, in which the corresponding pistons reach top dead centre at the same time, thus balancing each other in momentum.

* 1900: Rudolf Diesel demonstrated the diesel engine in the 1900 Exposition Universelle (World's Fair) using peanut oil.

* 1900: Wilhelm Maybach designed an engine built at Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft—following the specifications of Emil Jellinek—who required the engine to be named Daimler-Mercedes after his daughter. In 1902 automobiles with that engine were put into production by DMG.


Applications

Internal combustion engines are most commonly used for mobile propulsion systems. In mobile scenarios internal combustion is advantageous, since it can provide high power to weight ratios together with excellent fuel energy-density. These engines have appeared in almost all automobiles, motorbikes, many boats, and in a wide variety of aircraft and locomotives. Where very high power is required, such as jet aircraft, helicopters and large ships, they appear mostly in the form of gas turbines. They are also used for electric generators and by industry.

History of engines

Antiquity

Engines using human power, animal power, water power, wind power and even steam power date back to antiquity.

Human power was focused by the use of simple engines, such as the capstan, windlass or treadmill, and with ropes, pulleys, and block and tackle arrangements, this power was transmitted and multiplied. These were used in cranes and aboard ships during Ancient Greece, and in mines, water pumps and siege engines in Ancient Rome. Early oared warships used human power augmented by the simple engine of the lever -- the oar itself. The writers of those times, including Vitruvius, Frontinus and Pliny the Elder, treat these engines as commonplace, so their invention may be far more ancient.

By the 1st century AD, various breeds of cattle and horses were used in mills, using machines similar to those powered by humans in earlier times.

According to Strabo, a water powered mill was built in Kaberia in the kingdom of Mithridates in the 1st century BC. Use of water wheels in mills spread through Europe over the next few centuries. Some were quite complex, with aqueducts, dams, and sluices to maintain and channel the water, and systems of gears, or toothed-wheels made of wood with metal, used to regulate the speed of rotation. In a poem by Ausonius in the 4th century, he mentions a stone-cutting saw powered by water.

Hero of Alexandria demonstrated both wind and steam powered machines in the 1st century, although it is not known if these were put to any practical use.


Modern

English inventor Sir Samuel Morland allegedly used gunpowder to drive water pumps in the 17th century. For more conventional, reciprocating internal combustion engines the fundamental theory for two-stroke engines was established by Sadi Carnot, France, 1824, whilst the American Samuel Morey received a patent on April 1, 1826.

Automotive production has used a range of energy-conversion systems. These include electric, steam, solar, turbine, rotary, and piston-type internal combustion engines. The gasoline internal combustion engine, operating on a four-stroke Otto cycle, has been the most successful for automobiles, while diesel engines are used for trucks and buses. The patent on the design by Otto had been declared void.

Karl Benz led in the development of new engines. In 1878 he began to work on new patents. He concentrated his efforts on creating a reliable gas two-stroke engine, based on Nikolaus Otto's design of the four-stroke engine. Karl Benz showed his real genius, however, through his successive inventions registered while designing what would become the production standard for his two-stroke engine. Benz finished his engine on New Year's Eve and was granted a patent for it in 1879.

In 1896, Karl Benz was granted a patent for his design of the first boxer engine with horizontally-opposed pistons. His design created an engine in which the corresponding pistons reach top dead centre simultaneously, thus balancing each other with respect to momentum. Flat engines with four or fewer cylinders are most commonly boxer engines and are also known as, horizontally-opposed engines. This continues to be the design principle for high performance, automobile racing engines such as Porsches.

Continuance of the use of the internal combustion engine for automobiles is partially due to the improvement of engine control systems (computers) and forced induction (turbos and superchargers), giving modern diesel engines the same power characteristics as gasoline engines. This is especially evident with the popularity of diesel engines in Europe.

The internal combustion engine was originally selected for the automobile due to its flexibility over a wide range of speeds. Also, the power developed for a given weight engine was reasonable; it could be produced by economical mass-production methods; and it used a readily available, moderately priced fuel--gasoline.

In today’s world, there has been a growing emphasis on the pollution producing features of automotive power systems. This has created new interest in alternate power sources and internal-combustion engine refinements that were not economically feasible in prior years. Although a few limited-production battery-powered electric vehicles have appeared, they have not proved to be competitive owing to costs and operating characteristics. In the twenty-first century the diesel engine has been increasing in popularity with automobile owners. However, the gasoline engine, with its new emission-control devices to improve emission performance, has not yet been challenged significantly.

The first half of the twentieth century saw a trend to increase engine power, particularly in the American models. Design changes incorporated all known methods of raising engine capacity, including increasing the pressure in the cylinders to improve efficiency, increasing the size of the engine, and increasing the speed at which power is generated. The higher forces and pressures created by these changes created engine vibration and size problems that led to stiffer, more compact engines with V and opposed cylinder layouts replacing longer straight-line arrangements. In passenger cars, V-8 layouts were adopted for all piston displacements greater than 250 cubic inches (4 litres).

Smaller cars brought about a return a to smaller engines, the four- and six-cylinder designs rated as low as 80 horsepower (60 kW), compared with the standard-size V-8 of large cylinder bore and relatively short piston stroke with power ratings in the range from 250 to 350 hp (190 to 260 kW).

The automobile motor had a bigger range, varying from 1-9 cylinders with corresponding differences in overall size, weight, piston displacement, and cylinder bores. Four cylinders and power ratings from 19 to 120 hp (14 to 90 kW) were followed in a majority of the models. Several three-cylinder, two-stroke-cycle models were built while most engines had straight or in-line cylinders. There were several V-type models and horizontally opposed two- and four-cylinder makes too. Overhead camshafts were frequently employed. The smaller engines were commonly air-cooled and located at the rear of the vehicle; compression ratios were relatively low. The 1970s and '80s saw an increased interest in improved fuel economy which brought in a return to smaller V-6 and four-cylinder layouts, with as many as five valves per cylinder to improve efficiency.