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The Evolution of Diesel Engines GENERAL ARTICLE The Evolution of Diesel Engines U Shrinivasa Rudolf Diesel thought of an engine which is inherently more efficient than the steam engines of the end-nineteenth century, for providing motive power in a distributed way. His intense perseverance, spread over a decade, led to the engines of today which bear his name. U Shrinivasa teaches Steam Engines: History vibrations and dynamics of machinery at the Department The origin of diesel engines is intimately related to the history of of Mechanical Engineering, steam engines. The Greeks and the Romans knew that steam IISc. His other interests include the use of straight could somehow be harnessed to do useful work. The device vegetable oils in diesel aeolipile (Figure 1) known to Hero of Alexandria was a primitive engines for sustainable reaction turbine apparently used to open temple doors! However development and working this aspect of obtaining power from steam was soon forgotten and with CAE applications in the industries. millennia later when there was a requirement for lifting water from coal mines, steam was introduced into a large vessel and quenched to create a low pressure for sucking the water to be pumped. Newcomen in 1710 introduced a cylinder piston ar- rangement and a hinged beam (Figure 2) such that water could be pumped from greater depths. The condensing steam in the cylin- der pulled the piston down to create the pumping action. Another half a century later, in 1765, James Watt avoided the cooling of the hot chamber containing steam by adding a separate condensing chamber (Figure 3). This successful steam engine pump found investors to manufacture it but the coal mines already had horses to lift the water to be pumped. Only when the manufac- Figure 1. The aeolipile of Hero of Alexandria. turers thought of installing the pumps at their own cost and settled Courtesy: for returns equivalent to one third the difference between the cost http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:Aeolipile_illustration.JPG of fodder for the horses and coal for the pumps’ boiler did the market pick up. It is a separate matter that Watt and his investors Keywords made good money. Rudolf Diesel, steam engine, die- sel engine, engine subsystems. RESONANCE April 2012 365 GENERAL ARTICLE Another need arose about 50 years later. Early minable mineral deposits on the hills were already being connected to the ports via rails. Ore-laden box cars were running down the rails by gravity. However, horses were required to haul the empty cars up and to negotiate difficult gradients. Ideally, there was a requirement for a distributed source of motive power. Some skilled youngsters were building streetcars based on Watts steam engine pump. In 1814, George Stephenson was one such hobbyist. Every part of the car, from the boiler to the engine and the mechanisms had to be hand-forged. The car was too slow on the street to be of any interest and the makers just walked with it! The exhaust steam jet in the front was however, shying away the horses used by the townspeople who objected vehemently, protested and threatened to ban the cars. Dis- gusted with the impediments, the inventor redirected the exhaust jet upwards and he could never catch up with the car then onwards. Steam locomotives thus arrived, started haul- ing the railcars both up and down and railways expanded. Heat Engines: Theory The necessary theoretical framework for the design of steam engines became available in a book published by Sadi Carnot1 in 1824. He discussed the heat engine, in actuality a thermody- namic process, receiving heat from a hot source and delivering Figure 2 (top). Newcomen steam engine. work output, simultaneously rejecting the remaining heat to a Courtesy: cold source (Figure 4). The hot and cold reservoirs are at constant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ temperatures T and T . The heat engine consists of a working Thomas_Newcomen H C fluid going through a set of process steps that exchanges heat Figure 3 (bottom). Original from and to the hot and cold sources respectively. One such set condenser by Watt. Courtesy: Figure 4. Carnot’s heat engine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carnot_heat_engine_2.svg File:Watts_First_Condenser.jpg 1 See Resonance, Vol.6, No.11, 2001. 366 RESONANCE April 2012 GENERAL ARTICLE where the working fluid goes back to the initial state so that the Figure 5 (left). P–V diagram cycle can be repeated is shown in Figure 5. The axes are the of Carnot’s cycle. instantaneous pressure and volume of the working fluid, steam, Courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ gas or vapour. The equation of state, PV = mRT connects the three File:Carnot_cycle_p- variables P, V and T, the temperature in Kelvin, thus completely V_diagram.svg determining the state of an ideal gas. R is the universal gas Figure 6 (right). Tempera- constant and m is the number of kg-mole of the gas present. The ture-entropy diagram of the cycle shown in Figure 5 has isothermal heat exchanges with the Carnot’s cycle. source and the sink and the other two process steps are adiabatic. Courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Each process step is reversible and the cycle constitutes the ideal File:CarnotCycle1.png Carnot cycle. To know its efficiency, the process steps are shown in Figure 6 on a temperature–entropy diagram. Since the quantity of heat transferred, Q, in a process step is given by Q =Tds, the efficiency Carnot of the Carnot cycle is given by Carnot = 1– (TC /TH) . Sadi Carnot showed in his book that if there is any other revers- ible cycle operating between TH and TC , its efficiency will also be equal to Carnot . Since any irreversibility would mean losses, Carnot efficiency thus becomes the maximum attainable. RESONANCE April 2012 367 GENERAL ARTICLE Lord Kelvin first used Carnot’s book of 1824, Reflections on the motive power of fire the word and the machines fitted to develop that power, written in French, thermodynamics to went unnoticed till 1834, when Émile Clapeyron discussed it in describe the his memoirs. Rudolf Clausius read the memoirs and his later necessary theory to work included refining the suppositions of Carnot and developing understand how on them to introduce the concept of entropy and arriving at a steam engines mathematical equation of the second law of thermodynamics. In worked, just about fact, it was William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) who first used 100 years after the word ‘thermodynamics’, for the subject which described the James Watt’s steam necessary theory to understand how steam engines worked, just engine pump started about 100 years after James Watt’s steam engine pump started working. working. Diesel Cycle: Origin Carl von Linde, well known for his refrigeration cycle, refrigera- tors and separating oxygen from air, graduated in 1864 from the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology in Zurich. One of his teachers was Rudolf Clausius. von Linde, joined as lecturer in 1868 at the Technische Hochschule München (now Technical University Munich) started in that year, became a professor in 1872 and started his own department. Rudolf Diesel joined as a student in the department and studied heat engines, attending Professor Linde’s lectures. Listening to his professor who had learnt thermodynamics directly from one of the originators, Rudolf Clausius, and knowing that steam engines had been a roaring commercial success for over a 100 years by then despite the poor efficiencies achieved, as he noted later in his famous presentation at Kassel (Figure 7), he identified the boiler as the weakest link in the chain. Therefore he came up with a radically new alterna- tive: burning powdered coal in the cylinder itself! To achieve this objective he thought of reaching a very high pressure in the adiabatic compression leg of the Carnot cycle, a pressure so high Diesel came up with a (about 90 bar) that the coal powder (fuel) injected at that point radically new will auto-ignite, with the temperature being around 800°C. The alternative: burning isothermal heat addition part of the Carnot cycle was to be powdered coal in the achieved by regulating the fuel supply such that the cylinder cylinder itself! material would be able to withstand the temperature. Adiabatic 368 RESONANCE April 2012 GENERAL ARTICLE Economical efficiency 20 15 10 Efficiency % 5 0 50 150 250 350 450 550 650 750 Power (HP) expansion for the power stroke and isothermal heat rejection by Figure 7 (left). Steam engine exhausting to the atmosphere and taking in a fresh charge of air efficiencies (based on num- complete the cycle. bers presented by Diesel in his Kassel lecture). Assuming a TH = 1073 K and TC = 288 K, the Carnot efficiency Figure 8 (right). Engine effi- exceeds 70%. With the expected friction losses Diesel hoped that ciencies through the years. an overall 50% efficiency would be achievable which was way beyond the levels in Figure 7 for steam engines. Today’s large diesel engines, generating electricity at about 80 MW levels, do achieve 50% efficiency (Figure 8). This marvel of an idea of Diesel looking absolutely feasible for him also convinced the leading steam engine manufacturers of the time to invest in the development of the new engine. This marvel of an idea of Diesel for the new It is one thing to generate enough financial support for building a heat engine, looking prototype and proving the concept to be practised and an entirely absolutely feasible for different matter to have that enormous grit and perseverance to him, also convinced overcome every technical hurdle until the prototype proves itself.
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