History and Fundamental Principles of the Diesel Engine
On February 27, 1892, the engineer Rudolf Diesel filed a patent with the Imperial Patent Office in Berlin for a “new rational heat engine”. On February 23, 1893, he was granted the patent DRP 67207 for the “Working Method and Design for Combustion Engines
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History and Fundamental Principles of the Diesel Engine Klaus Mollenhauer and Klaus Schreiner
1.1
The History of the Diesel Engine
On February 27, 1892, the engineer Rudolf Diesel filed a patent with the Imperial Patent Office in Berlin for a ‘‘new rational heat engine’’. On February 23, 1893, he was granted the patent DRP 67207 for the ‘‘Working Method and Design for Combustion Engines’’ dated February 28, 1892. This was an important first step toward the goal Diesel had set himself, which, as can be gathered from his biography, had preoccupied him since his days as a university student. Rudolf Diesel was born to German parents in Paris on March 18, 1858. Still a schoolboy when the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 broke out, he departed by way of London for Augsburg where he grew up with foster parents. Without familial and financial backing, young Rudolf Diesel was compelled to take his life into his own hands and contribute to his upkeep by, among other things, giving private lessons. Scholarships ultimately enabled him to study at the Polytechnikum Mu¨nchen, later the Technische Hochschule, from which he graduated in 1880 as the best examinee ever up to that time. There, in Professor Linde’s lectures on the theory of caloric machines, the student Diesel realized that the steam engine, the dominant heat engine of the day, wastes a tremendous amount of energy when measured against the ideal energy conversion cycle formulated by Carnot in 1824 (see Sect. 1.2). What is more, with efficiencies of approximately 3%, the boiler furnaces of the day emitted annoying smoke that seriously polluted the air. Surviving lecture notes document that Diesel already contemplated implementing the Carnot cycle as a student, if possible by directly utilizing the energy contained in coal without steam as an intermediate medium. While working at Lindes Eismaschinen, which brought him from Paris to Berlin, he also ambitiously pursued the idea of a rational engine, hoping his invention would bring him financial independence together with social advancement. He ultimately
K. Mollenhauer (*) Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected]
filed and was granted the aforementioned patent [1-1] with the following claim 1: Working method for combustion engines characterized by pure air or another indifferent gas (or steam) with a working piston compressing pure air so intensely in a cylinder that the temperature generated as a result is far above the ignition temperature of the fuel being used (curve 1-2 of the diagram in Fig. 2), whereupon, due to the expelling piston and the expansion of the compressed air (or gas) triggered as a result (curve 2-3 of the diagram in Fig. 2), the fuel is supplied so gradually from dead center onward that combustion occurs without significantly increasing pressure and temperature, whereupon, after the supply of fuel is terminated, the mass of gas in the working cylinder expands further (curve 3-4 of the diagram in Fig. 2).
Once the gas has been decompressed to the discharge pressure, heat dissipates along the iso
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