Harry Ricardo - Ricardo Consulting

Ricardo Consulting

During the 1960s a second round of development of the Comet system was started, now armed with considerably more powerful test apparatus. The refined design was immediately used in several cars, and the pre-combustion system remains in use in most diesel engines today. Ricardo Consulting remains committed to the diesel, considering it to be nowhere near its development potential even in the most advanced of today's engines.

In 1978 the US Department of Energy hired Ricardo Consulting to research the Stirling engine as a car engine. A series of engines, eventually forty-five in total, were built to test this system and showed very low emissions, but the efficiency was compromised by the need to operate under transient conditions—the design was best running at a single speed, making it less than useful as a car engine. The Stirling may make an excellent engine for (particularly series) hybrid cars and has recently generated some interest in this role.

In 1986, the Voyager was the first aircraft to fly around the world non-stop and without refuelling. Ricardo Consulting redesigned the otherwise "stock" Teledyne Continental engine to incorporate a highly efficient combustion system and water cooling, thereby dramatically reducing drag and improving fuel economy.

Ricardo worked on petrol (or gasoline) engines throughout his career, including pioneering work on direct injection gasoline engines for aircraft engines in the 1930s, but his best-known work was in the development of high-speed diesel engines for cars. He was responsible for designing the combustion-chambers for the first two diesel car engines produced in quantity — the Citroën Rosalie and Mercedes-Benz 260D — in the mid-thirties. Later, various versions of Ricardo's Comet pre-combustion chamber for car diesels were deployed in countless engines over four decades, and the Comet remains one of Ricardo's best-known personal achievements in automobile engineering.

Today several stratified charge engines are in use in the automobile market. Stratified charge is a technology that has come of age relatively recently, as a result of advances in manufacturing and electronics, but it was a feature of the first engine that Harry Ricardo built, while still in his teens, in the early years of the 20th century.