Contribution To Early Gas Engines
William Barnett was an engineer involved in the early development of internal combustion engines, and his work and patent are described over several pages in Dugald Clerk's book on Gas and Oil Engines. In Barnett's UK patent (No 7615 of 1838), which was entitled "Production of motive-power", Clerk states that "Barnett's inventions as described in his specification are so important that they require more complete description than has been accorded to earlier inventors", and he then proceeds to discuss Barnett's patent over several pages.
The patent describes three types of internal combustion engine run using gas as a fuel. These use two key inventions that were important to the early commercial gas engines (which do not appear until over 20 years later).
- One of the engines described in the patent uses compression of the fuel/air mixture in the power cylinder, the system which Clerk describes as "now so largely used in gas engines. The Frencheman, Lebon, it is true, described an engine using compression, in the year 1801, but his cycle is not in any way similar to that proposed by Barnett, or used in modern gas engines".
- The patent also describes a method for igniting the gas/air mixture within the cylinder using a flame transferred into the cylinder via an 'igniting cock'. This was a mechanism extensively used in many of the early commercial gas engines in the latter part of the 19th century.
The engines themselves are of considerable interest as precursors, not of the first commercial gas engines (e.g. Lenoir engine in 1860, which used the 2-stroke cycle without compression, or the Otto and Langen atmospheric engines), but rather of the later generation of engines including Otto's engines operating on the 4-stroke cycle and Dugald Clerk's engine operating on the 2-stroke cycle, both with compression of the gas/air mixture in the cylinder.
Read more about this topic: William Barnett (engineer)
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