Nutating disc engine
Encyclopedia
A nutating disc engine is an internal combustion engine
comprising fundamentally of one moving part and a direct drive onto the crankshaft
. Initially patented in 1993, it differs from earlier internal combustion engines in a number of ways and utilizes a type of motion
known as nutation
, drawing heavily from similar steam-powered engines developed in the 19th century.
prescribes a portion of a sphere
. A portion of the area of the disc is used for intake and compression, a portion is used to seal
against a center casing, and the remaining portion is used for expansion
and exhaust
. The compressed air is admitted to an external accumulator
, and then into an external combustion chamber
before it is admitted to the power side of the disc. The external combustion chamber enables the engine to use diesel fuel in small engine sizes, giving it unique capabilities for unmanned aerial vehicle
propulsion and other applications. One significant benefit of the nutating engine is the overlap of the power strokes.
Power is transmitted directly to the output shaft, (the crankshaft
), completely eliminating the need for complicated linkages
essential in a conventional piston engine (to convert the piston's linear motion to rotating output motion). Since the disc does not rotate, the seal velocities are lower than in an equivalent IC piston engine. The total seal length is rather long, however, which may negate this advantage.
The disc wobbles inside a housing and, in its simplest version, half of the single disc (one lobe) performs the intake/compression function while the other lobe performs the power/exhaust function. Note that the disc lobes can be configured to have equal compression and expansion volumes, or to have the compression volume greater than or less than
the expansion volume. This means that the engine can be self supercharged (see supercharger
), or operate as a Miller cycle
/ Atkinson cycle
.
The details of operation as well as the potential of the Meyer nutating disk engine has been published by Professor T. Alexander (publishes as T. Korakianitis) and co-workers
A single prototype
has been run briefly under its own power, with a power- to-weight ratio equal to those of typical current four-stroke engines. It is claimed by the authors of the developer/US Army/NASA
technical evaluation report that a production version of the new engine (for UAV applications) might provide a power-to-weight ratio of 1.6 hp/lb or 2.7 kW/kg . This is slightly better than current automotive production engines but nowhere near the Graupner G58 or the Desert Air DA 150 .
A company called McMasters, previously headed by successful American entrepreneur Harold McMaster
, is also developing a nutating motor burning a mixture of pure hydrogen
and pure oxygen
that, it claims, will give 200 hp but weigh only one-tenth that of gasoline/air production automotive engines with the same output. So far the McMasters company claims to have spent $10 million on its development. Plans are also being made to develop a version "the size of a coffee can" that can be built directly into wheel hubs, eliminating the traditional drive train entirely. This concept was first attempted in the British Leyland Mini Moke
but was, at that time, severely hampered by lack of reliable synchronization - which is now more commonplace because of ubiquitous miniaturized embedded
modern day computer chips. A gasoline
-powered version is also planned by McMasters, which is claimed to give substantially cleaner operation than traditional engines .
, Derbyshire
designed and had constructed a hydraulic engine (a water engine
) known as "The Romping Lion" to make use of the high-pressure water available near their mill.
The Dakeyne brothers had previously also invented "The Equalinium", a machine for the preparation of flax for spinning, and their father Daniel Dakeyne (1733-1819) was granted a patent for this device in 1794. It is often said that Edward and James did not take out the patent themselves because they were minors at the time, but in fact they were 23 and 21.
Little is known of their engine other than from the somewhat unclear description accompanying the patent, which was granted in 1830. Its main castings were made at the Morley Park foundry near Heage
, and it weighed 7 tons and generated 35 horsepower at a head of 96 feet of water.
Stephen Glover, in his gazetteer of Derbyshire, was enthusiastic about the prospects for the disc engine, foreseeing its use in all manner of applications, domestic as well as industrial, not only as a prime mover but also as a pump. He stated that John Dakeyne had also commissioned a disc engine to drive the bellows of an organ in the family's residence, Knabb House.
Frank Nixon in his book "The Industrial Archaeology of Derbyshire" (1969) commented that "The most striking characteristic of this ingenious machine is perhaps the difficulty experienced by those trying to describe it; the patentees & Stephen Glover only succeeded in producing descriptions of monumental incomprehensibility".
A larger model was constructed to drain lead mines at Alport
near Youlgreave
and many steam versions were subsequently built by other people.
In 1836 Davies and Taylor granted manufacturing rights for the engine to Fardon and Gossage, owners of a salt works. At the same time Davies was working on a canal tug with a disc engine driving a paddle wheel at the stern. By 1838 a 5 hp engine was in use at the salt works pumping brine.
In 1839 Davies, Taylor, Fardon and Gossage conveyed manufacturing rights to the engine to the Birmingham Patent Disc Engine company. As Superintendent of the Company, Henry Davies was responsible for all design and manufacture, while Gossage was a director. In February 1841 the Board reported that 26 engines had been completed, further engines totalling 260 horsepower were in progress, and a total of 500 horsepower were on order. They could make engines ranging from 5 to 30 horsepower and were currently making engines for a railway carriage. An article in a French journal of 1841 reported that a 12 hp engine had been in use for six months as a winding engine at Corbyn's Hall Mine, Dudley
, which could lift a load of 1 ton 180 ft in 1 minute. The disc engines cost from £96 for an 8 hp machine to £300 for a 30 hp model.
Ransomes of Ipswich (who were later to become the well known agricultural engineers, Ransomes and Sims) exhibited a portable steam engine at the Royal Liverpool Show in 1841, powered by a 5 hp BPDE disc engine.
By 1840 a canal boat, The Experiment, powered by a Davies engine, was being used for propellor testing, and in 1842 Davies installed a disc engine and disc pump in a canal barge which he demonstrated by draining mile of the Stourbridge canal. The same year, a 5 hp engine was fitted in one of HMS Geyser's pinnace
s. However, trials on the Thames and for the Directors of the Grand Junction canal failed to convince either the Admiralty or the canal owners.
Nevertheless there was a growing interest in using steam power on the canals, and the small beam of canal boats very much favoured disc engines. Davies saw his opportunity and built an iron-hulled canal tug with a 16 hp BPDE engine in 1843. To minimise wash he fitted four propellors spaced along a shaft the length of the boat and enclosed in a tube below the waterline. There were two of these propulsion units side by side for a total of 8 propellors. It worked well enough to convince the Directors of the Birmingham and Liverpool Junction Canal to order six tugs which could tow as many as sixteen barges a day at a reasonable speed. In use, a train of six to eight barges left Ellesmere Port and Wolverhampton each day, carrying an average of 100 tons. Unfortunately nobody had considered how the barge train was to transit through the canal locks and shallows. Each such obstruction meant that the train had to be uncoupled and the barges individually manhandled or towed by horse through the obstruction before the train was reassembled on the other side. This negated the benefits of the tug and train and in 1845 the canal's Directors removed the tugs from service.
In 1844 the BPDE collapsed. The workshop equipment, various completed engines and quantities of work in progress were offered for sale. During legal proceedings in 1851 following the bankruptcy of two of the BPDE's principal investors, it was said that the disc engine had not made a profit and that to have relied on it as a realisable asset "was absurd".
build his first engine in 1840, and a patent was granted in 1845. The partners Barnard William Farey and Bryan Donkin Jr. patented improvements to the basic design; Donkin had worked with Bishopp on his original engine, while Farey was an employee of Donkins.
Bishopp's engine met with some scepticism from the trade press when it was launched on the market. But Bishopp had opted to revert to the Dakeynes' original design which had a yoke which took most of the dynamic forces and greatly reduced the load on the bearings and seals. In the event that there was any leakage, the seals were adjustable. In addition, Bishopp had his engines produced by companies with recognised engineering capabilities rather than carrying out his own manufacturing; as well as Donkin's, some of his first engines were built by Joseph Whitworth & Co
of Manchester. Another engineering company with a very good reputation was G. Rennie and Son of London who were so convinced of the engine's potential that in 1849 they employed Bishopp as their foreman of works with specific responsibility for the disc engine.
By 1849 a number of Bishopp engines had been sold, and one was used with great success to run the printing presses of the Times
newspaper, while another produced by G. Rennie and Son was used to power the iron gunboat HMS Minx. The Times engine had been built by Whitworth and had been shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851 where it ran smoothly and quietly and impressed all who saw it.
In 1853 a disc engine 13 inches in diameter was purchased from Rennie to propel a 55 foot Russian gunboat, which it did at a speed of 7 knots (3.8 m/s).
At the time the advantages of the disc engine were listed in 1855 by The Mechanics' Magazine as:
Disc engines ultimately fell into disuse due to the competition offered by modern high speed steam engines which were small and light and could offer features such as compounding. Additionally, conventional engines did not require the same precision manufacture as disc engines and steam leakage was not a problem.
.
History
Technical reports
Engine
An engine or motor is a machine designed to convert energy into useful mechanical motion. Heat engines, including internal combustion engines and external combustion engines burn a fuel to create heat which is then used to create motion...
comprising fundamentally of one moving part and a direct drive onto the crankshaft
Crankshaft
The crankshaft, sometimes casually abbreviated to crank, is the part of an engine which translates reciprocating linear piston motion into rotation...
. Initially patented in 1993, it differs from earlier internal combustion engines in a number of ways and utilizes a type of motion
Motion (physics)
In physics, motion is a change in position of an object with respect to time. Change in action is the result of an unbalanced force. Motion is typically described in terms of velocity, acceleration, displacement and time . An object's velocity cannot change unless it is acted upon by a force, as...
known as nutation
Nutation
Nutation is a rocking, swaying, or nodding motion in the axis of rotation of a largely axially symmetric object, such as a gyroscope, planet, or bullet in flight, or as an intended behavior of a mechanism...
, drawing heavily from similar steam-powered engines developed in the 19th century.
Operation
In its basic configuration the core of the engine is a nutating non-rotating disc, with the center of its hub mounted in the middle of a Z-shaped shaft. The two ends of the shaft rotate, while the disc "nutates," (performs a wobbling motion without rotating around its axis). The motion of the disc circumferenceCircumference
The circumference is the distance around a closed curve. Circumference is a special perimeter.-Circumference of a circle:The circumference of a circle is the length around it....
prescribes a portion of a sphere
Sphere
A sphere is a perfectly round geometrical object in three-dimensional space, such as the shape of a round ball. Like a circle in two dimensions, a perfect sphere is completely symmetrical around its center, with all points on the surface lying the same distance r from the center point...
. A portion of the area of the disc is used for intake and compression, a portion is used to seal
Seal (mechanical)
A mechanical seal is a device which helps join systems or mechanisms together by preventing leakage , containing pressure, or excluding contamination...
against a center casing, and the remaining portion is used for expansion
Thermal expansion
Thermal expansion is the tendency of matter to change in volume in response to a change in temperature.When a substance is heated, its particles begin moving more and thus usually maintain a greater average separation. Materials which contract with increasing temperature are rare; this effect is...
and exhaust
Exhaust system
An exhaust system is usually tubing used to guide reaction exhaust gases away from a controlled combustion inside an engine or stove. The entire system conveys burnt gases from the engine and includes one or more exhaust pipes...
. The compressed air is admitted to an external accumulator
Accumulator
Accumulator may refer to:* Accumulator , in a CPU, a processor register for storing intermediate results* Accumulator , an apparatus for storing energy or power...
, and then into an external combustion chamber
Combustion chamber
A combustion chamber is the part of an engine in which fuel is burned.-Internal combustion engine:The hot gases produced by the combustion occupy a far greater volume than the original fuel, thus creating an increase in pressure within the limited volume of the chamber...
before it is admitted to the power side of the disc. The external combustion chamber enables the engine to use diesel fuel in small engine sizes, giving it unique capabilities for unmanned aerial vehicle
Unmanned aerial vehicle
An unmanned aerial vehicle , also known as a unmanned aircraft system , remotely piloted aircraft or unmanned aircraft, is a machine which functions either by the remote control of a navigator or pilot or autonomously, that is, as a self-directing entity...
propulsion and other applications. One significant benefit of the nutating engine is the overlap of the power strokes.
Power is transmitted directly to the output shaft, (the crankshaft
Crankshaft
The crankshaft, sometimes casually abbreviated to crank, is the part of an engine which translates reciprocating linear piston motion into rotation...
), completely eliminating the need for complicated linkages
Linkage (mechanical)
A mechanical linkage is an assembly of bodies connected together to manage forces and movement. The movement of a body, or link, is studied using geometry so the link is considered to be rigid. The connections between links are modeled as providing ideal movement, pure rotation or sliding for...
essential in a conventional piston engine (to convert the piston's linear motion to rotating output motion). Since the disc does not rotate, the seal velocities are lower than in an equivalent IC piston engine. The total seal length is rather long, however, which may negate this advantage.
The disc wobbles inside a housing and, in its simplest version, half of the single disc (one lobe) performs the intake/compression function while the other lobe performs the power/exhaust function. Note that the disc lobes can be configured to have equal compression and expansion volumes, or to have the compression volume greater than or less than
the expansion volume. This means that the engine can be self supercharged (see supercharger
Supercharger
A supercharger is an air compressor used for forced induction of an internal combustion engine.The greater mass flow-rate provides more oxygen to support combustion than would be available in a naturally aspirated engine, which allows more fuel to be burned and more work to be done per cycle,...
), or operate as a Miller cycle
Miller cycle
In engineering, the Miller cycle is a combustion process used in a type of four-stroke internal combustion engine. The Miller cycle was patented by Ralph Miller, an American engineer, in the 1940s.- Overview :...
/ Atkinson cycle
Atkinson cycle
The Atkinson cycle engine is a type of internal combustion engine invented by James Atkinson in 1882. The Atkinson cycle is designed to provide efficiency at the expense of power density, and is used in some modern hybrid electric applications.-Design:...
.
Patents and Production History
U.S. patent number 5,251,594 was granted to Leonard Meyer of Illinois in 1993 for a "nutating internal combustion disc engine". The Meyer Nutating Engine is a new type of internal combustion engine with higher power density than conventional reciprocating piston engines and which can operate on a variety of fuels, including gasoline, heavy fuels and hydrogen. The patent made reference to various 20th-century nutating engines in the United States, but no reference at all to the original Dakeyne engine, described below, in its prior art. The similarity to its 166-year-old hydraulic predecessor is strikingly evident, the main change being that the disc is not entirely flat but slightly convex.The details of operation as well as the potential of the Meyer nutating disk engine has been published by Professor T. Alexander (publishes as T. Korakianitis) and co-workers
A single prototype
Prototype
A prototype is an early sample or model built to test a concept or process or to act as a thing to be replicated or learned from.The word prototype derives from the Greek πρωτότυπον , "primitive form", neutral of πρωτότυπος , "original, primitive", from πρῶτος , "first" and τύπος ,...
has been run briefly under its own power, with a power- to-weight ratio equal to those of typical current four-stroke engines. It is claimed by the authors of the developer/US Army/NASA
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
technical evaluation report that a production version of the new engine (for UAV applications) might provide a power-to-weight ratio of 1.6 hp/lb or 2.7 kW/kg . This is slightly better than current automotive production engines but nowhere near the Graupner G58 or the Desert Air DA 150 .
A company called McMasters, previously headed by successful American entrepreneur Harold McMaster
Harold McMaster
Harold A. McMaster was an inventor with over 100 patents and entrepreneur who founded four companies. Fortune Magazine called him "The Glass Genius". He also worked on developing commercial-scale solar cell technology, and developed a new type of engine, the "McMaster Rotary Engine."McMaster was...
, is also developing a nutating motor burning a mixture of pure hydrogen
Hydrogen
Hydrogen is the chemical element with atomic number 1. It is represented by the symbol H. With an average atomic weight of , hydrogen is the lightest and most abundant chemical element, constituting roughly 75% of the Universe's chemical elemental mass. Stars in the main sequence are mainly...
and pure oxygen
Oxygen
Oxygen is the element with atomic number 8 and represented by the symbol O. Its name derives from the Greek roots ὀξύς and -γενής , because at the time of naming, it was mistakenly thought that all acids required oxygen in their composition...
that, it claims, will give 200 hp but weigh only one-tenth that of gasoline/air production automotive engines with the same output. So far the McMasters company claims to have spent $10 million on its development. Plans are also being made to develop a version "the size of a coffee can" that can be built directly into wheel hubs, eliminating the traditional drive train entirely. This concept was first attempted in the British Leyland Mini Moke
Mini Moke
The Mini Moke is a vehicle based on the Mini and designed for the British Motor Corporation by Sir Alec Issigonis. The name comes from "Mini"—the car with which the Moke shares many parts—and "Moke", which is an archaic dialect term for donkey...
but was, at that time, severely hampered by lack of reliable synchronization - which is now more commonplace because of ubiquitous miniaturized embedded
Embedded system
An embedded system is a computer system designed for specific control functions within a larger system. often with real-time computing constraints. It is embedded as part of a complete device often including hardware and mechanical parts. By contrast, a general-purpose computer, such as a personal...
modern day computer chips. A gasoline
Gasoline
Gasoline , or petrol , is a toxic, translucent, petroleum-derived liquid that is primarily used as a fuel in internal combustion engines. It consists mostly of organic compounds obtained by the fractional distillation of petroleum, enhanced with a variety of additives. Some gasolines also contain...
-powered version is also planned by McMasters, which is claimed to give substantially cleaner operation than traditional engines .
Dakeyne hydraulic disc engine
In the 1820s the mill owners Edward & James Dakeyne of Darley DaleDarley Dale
Darley Dale, also known simply as Darley, is a town in Derbyshire, England, with a population of around 6,000 people. It lies north of Matlock, on the River Derwent and the A6 road.- History :...
, Derbyshire
Derbyshire
Derbyshire is a county in the East Midlands of England. A substantial portion of the Peak District National Park lies within Derbyshire. The northern part of Derbyshire overlaps with the Pennines, a famous chain of hills and mountains. The county contains within its boundary of approx...
designed and had constructed a hydraulic engine (a water engine
Water engine
The water engine is a positive-displacement engine, often closely resembling a steam engine, with similar pistons and valves, that is driven by water pressure. The supply of water was derived from a natural head of water, the water mains, or a specialised high-pressure water supply such as that...
) known as "The Romping Lion" to make use of the high-pressure water available near their mill.
The Dakeyne brothers had previously also invented "The Equalinium", a machine for the preparation of flax for spinning, and their father Daniel Dakeyne (1733-1819) was granted a patent for this device in 1794. It is often said that Edward and James did not take out the patent themselves because they were minors at the time, but in fact they were 23 and 21.
Little is known of their engine other than from the somewhat unclear description accompanying the patent, which was granted in 1830. Its main castings were made at the Morley Park foundry near Heage
Heage
The village of Heage in Derbyshire is situated midway between Belper and Ripley and is today famous for its recently-restored six-sailed windmill. Work on building the mill started in 1791 and it was first recorded as working in 1797...
, and it weighed 7 tons and generated 35 horsepower at a head of 96 feet of water.
Stephen Glover, in his gazetteer of Derbyshire, was enthusiastic about the prospects for the disc engine, foreseeing its use in all manner of applications, domestic as well as industrial, not only as a prime mover but also as a pump. He stated that John Dakeyne had also commissioned a disc engine to drive the bellows of an organ in the family's residence, Knabb House.
Frank Nixon in his book "The Industrial Archaeology of Derbyshire" (1969) commented that "The most striking characteristic of this ingenious machine is perhaps the difficulty experienced by those trying to describe it; the patentees & Stephen Glover only succeeded in producing descriptions of monumental incomprehensibility".
A larger model was constructed to drain lead mines at Alport
Alport
Alport is a hamlet in the White Peak area of Derbyshire, England. It lies east of Youlgreave, at the confluence of the River Bradford and the River Lathkill. The oldest house in the hamlet is Monks Hall...
near Youlgreave
Youlgreave
Youlgreave or Youlgrave is a village in the Derbyshire Peak District, lying on the River Bradford, four kilometres south of Bakewell. Both spellings are used on different local signposts and on different maps. The name possibly derives from "yellow grove" , though was historically called "Giolgrave"...
and many steam versions were subsequently built by other people.
Davies and Taylor
The first people to develop steam-powered disc engines based on the Dakeynes' design were George Davies and Henry Taylor who patented their engine in 1836. It was fitted with valves to control the admission of steam and also differed from the Dakeynes' version in that the axis of the engine was horizontal and the casing of the engine rotated around the disc, the opposite of the original. More patents followed over the next eight years, mainly introducing expansive working and improving the engine's sealing.In 1836 Davies and Taylor granted manufacturing rights for the engine to Fardon and Gossage, owners of a salt works. At the same time Davies was working on a canal tug with a disc engine driving a paddle wheel at the stern. By 1838 a 5 hp engine was in use at the salt works pumping brine.
In 1839 Davies, Taylor, Fardon and Gossage conveyed manufacturing rights to the engine to the Birmingham Patent Disc Engine company. As Superintendent of the Company, Henry Davies was responsible for all design and manufacture, while Gossage was a director. In February 1841 the Board reported that 26 engines had been completed, further engines totalling 260 horsepower were in progress, and a total of 500 horsepower were on order. They could make engines ranging from 5 to 30 horsepower and were currently making engines for a railway carriage. An article in a French journal of 1841 reported that a 12 hp engine had been in use for six months as a winding engine at Corbyn's Hall Mine, Dudley
Dudley
Dudley is a large town in the West Midlands county of England. At the 2001 census , the Dudley Urban Sub Area had a population of 194,919, making it the 26th largest settlement in England, the second largest town in the United Kingdom behind Reading, and the largest settlement in the UK without...
, which could lift a load of 1 ton 180 ft in 1 minute. The disc engines cost from £96 for an 8 hp machine to £300 for a 30 hp model.
Ransomes of Ipswich (who were later to become the well known agricultural engineers, Ransomes and Sims) exhibited a portable steam engine at the Royal Liverpool Show in 1841, powered by a 5 hp BPDE disc engine.
By 1840 a canal boat, The Experiment, powered by a Davies engine, was being used for propellor testing, and in 1842 Davies installed a disc engine and disc pump in a canal barge which he demonstrated by draining mile of the Stourbridge canal. The same year, a 5 hp engine was fitted in one of HMS Geyser's pinnace
Pinnace (ship's boat)
As a ship's boat the pinnace is a light boat, propelled by sails or oars, formerly used as a "tender" for guiding merchant and war vessels. In modern parlance, pinnace has come to mean a boat associated with some kind of larger vessel, that doesn't fit under the launch or lifeboat definitions...
s. However, trials on the Thames and for the Directors of the Grand Junction canal failed to convince either the Admiralty or the canal owners.
Nevertheless there was a growing interest in using steam power on the canals, and the small beam of canal boats very much favoured disc engines. Davies saw his opportunity and built an iron-hulled canal tug with a 16 hp BPDE engine in 1843. To minimise wash he fitted four propellors spaced along a shaft the length of the boat and enclosed in a tube below the waterline. There were two of these propulsion units side by side for a total of 8 propellors. It worked well enough to convince the Directors of the Birmingham and Liverpool Junction Canal to order six tugs which could tow as many as sixteen barges a day at a reasonable speed. In use, a train of six to eight barges left Ellesmere Port and Wolverhampton each day, carrying an average of 100 tons. Unfortunately nobody had considered how the barge train was to transit through the canal locks and shallows. Each such obstruction meant that the train had to be uncoupled and the barges individually manhandled or towed by horse through the obstruction before the train was reassembled on the other side. This negated the benefits of the tug and train and in 1845 the canal's Directors removed the tugs from service.
In 1844 the BPDE collapsed. The workshop equipment, various completed engines and quantities of work in progress were offered for sale. During legal proceedings in 1851 following the bankruptcy of two of the BPDE's principal investors, it was said that the disc engine had not made a profit and that to have relied on it as a realisable asset "was absurd".
Bishopp
A competitor to Davies and Taylor was former locomotive engineer George Daniell Bishopp, who had Donkin & CoBryan Donkin
Bryan Donkin was an English engineer and industrialist. Of his six sons, John, Bryan, and Thomas also became engineers.-Early life:Born in Sandoe, Northumberland, his father was a surveyor and land agent...
build his first engine in 1840, and a patent was granted in 1845. The partners Barnard William Farey and Bryan Donkin Jr. patented improvements to the basic design; Donkin had worked with Bishopp on his original engine, while Farey was an employee of Donkins.
Bishopp's engine met with some scepticism from the trade press when it was launched on the market. But Bishopp had opted to revert to the Dakeynes' original design which had a yoke which took most of the dynamic forces and greatly reduced the load on the bearings and seals. In the event that there was any leakage, the seals were adjustable. In addition, Bishopp had his engines produced by companies with recognised engineering capabilities rather than carrying out his own manufacturing; as well as Donkin's, some of his first engines were built by Joseph Whitworth & Co
Joseph Whitworth
Sir Joseph Whitworth, 1st Baronet was an English engineer, entrepreneur, inventor and philanthropist. In 1841, he devised the British Standard Whitworth system, which created an accepted standard for screw threads...
of Manchester. Another engineering company with a very good reputation was G. Rennie and Son of London who were so convinced of the engine's potential that in 1849 they employed Bishopp as their foreman of works with specific responsibility for the disc engine.
By 1849 a number of Bishopp engines had been sold, and one was used with great success to run the printing presses of the Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
newspaper, while another produced by G. Rennie and Son was used to power the iron gunboat HMS Minx. The Times engine had been built by Whitworth and had been shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851 where it ran smoothly and quietly and impressed all who saw it.
In 1853 a disc engine 13 inches in diameter was purchased from Rennie to propel a 55 foot Russian gunboat, which it did at a speed of 7 knots (3.8 m/s).
At the time the advantages of the disc engine were listed in 1855 by The Mechanics' Magazine as:
- It was as much as half the weight of a conventional steam engine of equivalent power
- It had the advantages of rotary steam engines without their inconvenience
- It was more economical in terms of fuel: as much as 18%
- It was capable of higher RPM without needing gearing
- It was suited to high-pressure use
Disc engines ultimately fell into disuse due to the competition offered by modern high speed steam engines which were small and light and could offer features such as compounding. Additionally, conventional engines did not require the same precision manufacture as disc engines and steam leakage was not a problem.
Water meters
The nutating disc meter which uses the same geometry and concept as the Dakeynes' original engine is probably the most widely used flowmeter in the world, and it is claimed that more than half the water meters installed in domestic premises in the US and Europe are of this type. Used for 150 years, it is essentially a Dakeyne Disc Engine and was most probably developed by Farey and Donkin who mentioned a "fluid measurement meter" in their 1850 disc engine patent granted in 1850. By 1859 they were being manufactured by the Buffalo Meter Company of Buffalo, New YorkBuffalo, New York
Buffalo is the second most populous city in the state of New York, after New York City. Located in Western New York on the eastern shores of Lake Erie and at the head of the Niagara River across from Fort Erie, Ontario, Buffalo is the seat of Erie County and the principal city of the...
.
External links
- Patent document from USPTO
- The Romping Lion - the story of the Dakeyne Disc Engine
- Description of engine - Cornell university and links to three illustrations, one from The Mechanics Magazine, 1833.
- article re: Len Meyer/ Baker engineering Inc. contract to develop engine
- Animation 1 of McMaster Engine
- Animation 2. of McMaster Engine
History
- Inventors - The Romping Lion, Peakland Heritage site
- The Dakeyne Hydraulic Engine by Phil Wigfull
- The Dakeyne brothers. Thurston, "History of the Growth of the Steam Engine"
Technical reports