Introduction of engine design And History of fuels

A Brief Outline of the History of the Internal Combustion Engine 1680 - Dutch physicist, Christian Huygens designed (but never built) an internal combustion engine that was to be fueled with gunpowder. 1807 - Francois Isaac de Rivaz of Switzerland invented an internal combustion engine that used a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen for fuel. Rivaz designed a car for his engine The first internal combustion powered automobile. However, his was a very unsuccessful design. 1824 - English engineer, Samuel Brown adapted an old Newcomen steam engine to burn gas, and he used it to briefly power a vehicle up Shooter's Hill in London. 1858 - Belgian-born engineer, Jean Joseph tienne Lenoir invented and patented (1860) a double-acting, electric spark-ignition internal combustion engine fueled by coal gas. In 1863, Lenoir attached an improved engine (using petroleum and a primitive carburetor) to a threewheeled wagon that managed to complete an historic fifty-mile road trip. 1862 - Alphonse Beau de Rochas, a French civil engineer, patented but did not build a fourstroke engine (French patent #52,593, January 16, 1862). 1864 - Austrian engineer, Siegfried Marcus*, built a one-cylinder engine with a crude carburetor, and attached his engine to a cart for a rocky 500-foot drive. Several years later, Marcus designed a vehicle that briefly ran at 10 mph that a few historians have considered as the forerunner of the modern automobile by being the world's first gasoline-powered vehicle. 1873 - George Brayton, an American engineer, developed an unsuccessful two-stroke kerosene engine (it used two external pumping cylinders). However, it was considered the first safe and practical oil engine. 1866 - German engineers, Eugen Langen and Nikolaus August Otto improved on Lenoir's and de Rochas' designs and invented a more efficient gas engine. 1876 - Nikolaus August Otto invented and later patented a successful four-stroke engine, known as the "Otto cycle". 1876 - The first successful two-stroke engine was invented by Sir Dougald Clerk. 1883 - French engineer, Edouard Delamare-Debouteville, built a single-cylinder four-stroke engine that ran on stove gas. It is not certain if he did indeed build a car, however, Delamare-Debouteville's designs were very advanced for the time - ahead of both Daimler and Benz in some ways at least on paper. 1885 - Gottlieb Daimler invented what is often recognized as the prototype of the modern gas engine - with a vertical cylinder, and with gasoline injected through a carburetor (patented in 1887). Daimler first built a two-wheeled vehicle the "Reitwagen" (Riding Carriage) with this engine and a year later built the world's first four-wheeled motor vehicle. 1886 - On January 29, Karl Benz received the first patent (DRP No. 37435) for a gas-fueled car. 1889 - Daimler built an improved four-stroke engine with mushroom-shaped valves and two V-slant cylinders. 1890 - Wilhelm Maybach built the first four-cylinder, four-stroke engine.

History of Internal Combustion Engine Fuels 1860s, 70s Engines were developed as stationary power plants and the primary fuel was gas. The gas used at that time was mostly coal gas (vapours from heating coal in an enclosed vessel), coke oven gas or blast furnace gas. For practical purposes, mobile engines required liquid fuels. The problem with spark ignition engines was to store and handle the fuel as a liquid and then vaporize it just in time to mix with the air in the engine. Most liquid fuels were originally based on animal fat and had very low vapour pressure so they did not vaporize well unless a considerable amount of heat was applied. 1880s The fledgling petroleum industry (actually started in the 1850's and 60's) was now able to distill crude oil into asphalt & wax -very heavy components which did not boil when heated heavy oil -which did boil but condensed first and was good for lubrication and for wick-type lamps kerosine-which condensed at higher temperature and was good for lamps and (with enough carburettorheat) for engines requiring gaseous fuel gasoline -which, as the name implies, was a liquid fuel which easily gasified. This original "straight-run" gasoline had a very low anti-knock rating so the compression ratio of Otto cycle engines using it was limited to about 4/1. 1890's Diesel wanted to use powdered coal in his compression-ignition engine. However, he needed to mix some lubricating oil with the coal powder so that it could be injected without pump plugging problems. The best proportion of oil to use proved to be 100%; he found it easiest to pump medium heavy oils in his fuel injection systems. He also found that heavier oils ignited more uniformly with less ignition delay so his diesel engines ended up running on Dieselfuel oil, heavier than kerosinebut lighter than most lubricating oils. 1907-1915 The growth of the automobile population produced a 5-fold increase in gasoline demand over this period. The refiners had a serious problem since their market for kerosineand lubricating oil was insufficient to use all the leftover product when they produced gasoline. They had to find a way of improving the gasoline yield from each barrel of crude put through the refinery. Thermal cracking was developed. Heavy oil was heated for 24 hours at 750F and 85 psiand the high temperature caused some if it to break down into lighter compounds which were condensed and used as gasoline. The cracked gasoline had a lower vapourpressure than straight run gasoline, resulting in engine starting problems.

 Light components condensed from natural gas were blended to improve volatility. 1923 A research project at GM Research tested the effect on engine knock of every chemical they could buy from chemical suppliers. Tetra-ethyl lead was found to be the most effective anti-knock compound. 1923 Houdry(in France) developed a catalytic cracking process to further improve the yield of gasoline from crude oil. The catalyst also produced fairly high octane gasoline (about 80 octane but nobody knew that yet since there was no octane number). The catalytic process was expensive so it was not widely used until the late 1930's. 1926 Pure iso-octane was isolated and an octane scale was devised. For the first time, there was a standard way to test fuels for knock resistance. Essentially, n-heptaneis assigned an octane number of 0 and iso-octane is assigned 100. An unknown fuel is tested by finding its knock limit and then finding the nheptane/iso-octanemixture which knocks at the same conditions. The fuel's octane number is then the iso-octane fraction of the blend (in %). 1931 The standard octane test was devised, using a particular engine (Waukesha CFR) and defined operating conditions to test an unknown fuel against n-heptane/iso-octaneblends. 1930's Catalytic cracking came into use and was supplemented by catalytic alkylationwhich produced very high octane gasoline (90 octane without lead, 100 plus with 3 mg/L of tetraethyl lead). Alkylatedgasoline was the basis for most of the aircraft fuel in WW II. WW II German need for fuel during the war led to processes to produce synthetic gasoline and diesel from coal. These processes were successful but expensive so they declined when petroleum-based fuel became available again. 1940's Smog started to appear in the Los Angeles area. This brown-yellow fog contains high levels of acid and ozone, causing respiratory irritation and damage to lungs and plants. 1952 The smog problem was linked directly to the combination of NOx(oxides of nitrogen) and HC (unburnthydrocarbons) emitted from automobiles and other engines. 1960's The first pollution controls were placed on cars, mostly to limit hydrocarbon vapourloss from the fuel tank and crankcase. 1970's Much more significant pollution controls were placed on cars in the U.S. To achieve low tailpipe emissions, catalytic converters were required.

 Lead poisoned catalytic converters so the refiners had to produce high-octane gasoline without tetraethyl lead. This led to further improvements in fractioning, catalytic cracking & reforming, hydrogenation, and isomerizationto produce a higher quality base fuel which did not require lead addition. 1990's "Reformulated" gasoline is introduced with controlled volatility to reduce evaporative emissions and lower aromatic content to improve its oxidation in catalytic converters. The history of fuels dealt mostly with gasoline (also called petrol) and Diesel because those are common transportation (and hence engine) fuels. However, we use a wide range of fuels, mostly made of some combination of Carbon and Hydrogen. Table 1 shows the range of most common fuels, arranged loosely from pure carbon (left) to pure hydrogen (right) and the presence of oxygen (bottom).

TABLE 1

The Range of Common Carbon/Hydrogen Fuels

Schematic of the Fractionation of Crude Oil into Products of Varying Volatility .

Economic pressure is to increase the Gasoline/Petrol fraction. To a large extent, the history of the petroleum refining industry has been dominated by improving the quantity and quality of gasoline obtained from a given amount of crude oil.

 The three main engine types, Otto, Diesel, and Brayton, (in the form of spark ignition and compression ignition reciprocating engines and gas turbines), consume the majority of the refined petroleum output. In Thailand, the demand for diesel generally exceeds the fraction naturally available from crude oils. Hence, the refinery industry is driven by efforts to increase the quantity of high quality diesel with producing an excessive amount of gasoline and low grade byproducts. The result has been increasing complexity of refineries with additional catalytic cracking, separation, and catalytic reforming stages which aim to increase the fraction of heavy-weight paraffin isomers as these make the ideal base fuel for compression-ignition engines.