Two 1860s Hot Air Engines (1869)

Perpendicular section of Shaw's hot air engine

The state-of-the-art in hot-air engine design of the late 1860s as described in Spon's Dictionary of Engineering. Edited by Oliver Byrne, this technical encyclopaedia was published between 1869 and 1874. Hot air engines were treated in Division I (1869). Byrne's choice is quite selective. He omits both Ericsson's and Stirling's designs of the preceding decade (admittedly, these had failed). Stress is placed on open-cycle designs, using special furnaces and very simple regenerators. These designs were doomed to fail, too, we can say with easy hindsight. Byrne describes two examples of this type of hot-air engine: those invented by Shaw and Wenham.

omvang - 11 pp - 7 illus
afmetingen - A5
uitvoering - paperback