Out Of The Industrial Era | How Diesel Changed The World

On September 29, 1913, a steamship named Dresden was en route from Antwerp, Belgium to Harwich, England. One of the ship’s passengers Rudolf Diesel, the man later credited as the inventor of his eponymous engine, inexplicably disappeared. On October 10, a sailor aboard the Belgian steamer, North Sea, caught the view of a body floating in the ocean. It was later realized that the body was in fact, Rudolf Diesel. Despite a mounting deal of speculation surrounding his disappearance. His death was judged officially as a suicide though his death is still believed to be murder.

At the time of his death, he was on his way to England to meet with the British navy in regards to the installation of his engine as a suitable power plant on their submarines. Subsequently, conspiracy theories surfaced almost immediately and news headlines read “Inventor Thrown Into the Sea to Stop Sale of Patents to British Government,”, another even read “Murdered by Agents from Big Oil Trusts.” However the likelihood of Diesel throwing himself off the Dresden was high—as it turns out, he was nearly broke—but the uncertainty surrounding his death may never be solved.

Before his death, Diesel patented his engine design on February 28, 1892; and the following year, he explained his revolutionary design in a paper called “Theory and Construction of a Rational Heat Engine to Replace the Steam Engine and Contemporary Combustion Engine.” During that time, steam engines drove the industrial era powering factories, mills, trains, and ships but were unnecessarily large, inefficient, and laborious to use. Rudolph recognized this and knew the steam engine was primed for a replacement.

The initial inspiration for Diesel’s engine came from pneumatic cigar lighters that had existed at that time. Pneumatic cigar lighters utilized a disk that was pressed into a closed glass tube. When the user repeatedly compresses the lever, the air trapped in the glass tube would become hot enough to ignite the wick attached to the disc.

This phenomenon is easily observed in a bicycle pump. The body of the air pump becomes noticeably hot as the pump is repeatedly compressed. The air inside the pump is essentially heated by the generated pressure; which is the fundamental principle that Diesel’s engine design is founded on.

His new invention was known as a “compression ignition engine” which could burn almost any fuel. Early prototypes ran on vegetable or peanut oil and required no ignition system. A stark contrast to the conventional combustion engines of the time. The actual ignition happened when fuel was introduced into a cylinder full of air that had been compressed to extremely high pressures. Let’s further explore the basic principles of how a diesel engine works and its notable differences between a gasoline engine.

Much like a petrol or gasoline engine, the diesel engine operates on the same four-stroke thermodynamic cycle. A thermodynamic cycle is a sequence of actions that involve the transfer of heat into and out of a contained system. And the changing pressure, temperature, and other variables that eventually return the system to its initial state. The sequence of actions that will be our primary consideration is the Intake, Compression, Combustion, and Exhaust cycles.

A gasoline and diesel engine starts their thermodynamic cycle when air is introduced through the intake port when the intake valve opens, and fuel is injected by way of the fuel injector. This happens while the piston begins the intake stroke. When the intake valve closes and the piston is brought upward, the atomized fuel and air mixture is then compressed. At this point, the notable differences begin to surface. The spark plug on the gasoline engine fires off. As the spark plug ignites, the piston is forced downward by the combustion in the gasoline engine. As for the diesel engine, the air and fuel mixture reaches its self-ignition temperature as a result of the rising piston.

Self-ignition is the lowest temperature at which an air/fuel mixture spontaneously ignites without a source of ignition but entirely by compression.
At this moment, combustion takes place driving the piston downward in both engines.
The exhaust valve then opens and burnt gas is forced out by the rising piston. Air and fuel are brought in again and the cycle is repeated.

It’s this compression that allows the air and fuel to ignite in a diesel engine without a spark from a spark plug. This is also the reason why diesel engines have higher compression ratios compared to gasoline engines which don’t compress the air/fuel mixture to the point of self-ignition.

A compression ratio is the ratio of the maximum to minimum volume in a cylinder. For example, a 10:1 ratio means that when the piston is at BDC, there is 10 times more volume in a cylinder than when the piston is at TDC.

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