History
The concept of this engine was established by Herbert Akroyd Stuart at 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 the USA by the German emigrants Mietz 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 and Pythagoras engine factory in Sweden. Bolinder is now part of the Volvo group.
Akroyd-Stuart's heavy oil engine (compared to spark-ignition) is distinctly different from Rudolf Diesel's better-known engine where ignition is initiated through the heat of compression. An oil engine will have a compression ratio of about 3:1, where a typical Diesel engine will have a compression ratio ranging between 15:1 and 20:1. Furthermore, fuel is injected during the intake stroke and not at the end of the compression stroke as in a diesel.
Read more about this topic: Hot Bulb Engine
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)