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The US Rider-Ericsson Engine Company was the successor of the DeLamater Iron Works and the Rider Engine Company, having bought from both companies their extensive plants and entire stocks of engines and patterns, covering all styles of Rider and Ericsson hot air pumping engines brought out by both of the old companies since 1844, excepting the original Ericsson engine, the patterns of which were burned in the DeLameter fire of 1888.
The company specialized in hot air pumping engines. A hot air engine is an external combustion engine. All hot air engines consist of a hot side and a cold side. Mechanical energy is derived from a hot air engine as air is repeatedly heated and cooled, expanding and contracting, and imparting pressure upon a reciprocating piston.
In his patent of 1759, Henry Wood was the first to document the powering an engine by the changing volume of air as it changed temperature. George Cayley was the first to build a working model in 1807. The Reverend Robert Stirling is generally credited with the "invention" of the hot air engine in 1816 for his development of a "regenerator" which conserves heat energy as the air moves between the hot and cold sides of the engine. Technically, not all hot air engines utilize regenerators, but the term hot air engine and Stirling engine are sometimes used interchangeably.
The Rider style engine is an "alpha" engine which uses two separate cylinders. As air in the hot side cylinder heats, it expands, driving the piston upward. The crankshaft now moves the cold side piston upward, drawing the hot air over to the cold side. The air cools, contracts, and pulls the hot side piston downward. The cold side piston then pushes the cool air over to the hot side, and the cycle repeats.
The Ericsson style engine is a "beta" engine, which contains both the power piston and displacer within one cylinder. The cylinder has a hot end, within the firebox, and a cold end, surrounded by a water jacket. As the air is heated within the cylinder, the air expands, driving the piston upward. The displacer next moves downward, pushing the air from the hot side into the cool side of the cylinder. The air then contracts, pulling the piston downward. The displacer then moves the air from the cool side to the hot side, the cycle begins again.
A heat engine is a system that converts heat to usable energy, particularly mechanical energy, which can then be used to do mechanical work. While originally conceived in the context of mechanical energy, the concept of the heat engine has been applied to various other kinds of energy, particularly electrical, since at least the late 19th century. The heat engine does this by bringing a working substance from a higher state temperature to a lower state temperature. A heat source generates thermal energy that brings the working substance to the higher temperature state. The working substance generates work in the working body of the engine while transferring heat to the colder sink until it reaches a lower temperature state. During this process some of the thermal energy is converted into work by exploiting the properties of the working substance. The working substance can be any system with a non-zero heat capacity, but it usually is a gas or liquid. During this process, some heat is normally lost to the surroundings and is not converted to work. Also, some energy is unusable because of friction and drag.
A reciprocating engine, also often known as a piston engine, is typically a heat engine that uses one or more reciprocating pistons to convert high temperature and high pressure into a rotating motion. This article describes the common features of all types. The main types are: the internal combustion engine, used extensively in motor vehicles; the steam engine, the mainstay of the Industrial Revolution; and the Stirling engine for niche applications. Internal combustion engines are further classified in two ways: either a spark-ignition (SI) engine, where the spark plug initiates the combustion; or a compression-ignition (CI) engine, where the air within the cylinder is compressed, thus heating it, so that the heated air ignites fuel that is injected then or earlier.
The Watt steam engine design was an invention of James Watt that became synonymous with steam engines during the Industrial Revolution, and it was many years before significantly new designs began to replace the basic Watt design.
A Stirling engine is a heat engine that is operated by the cyclic expansion and contraction of air or other gas by exposing it to different temperatures, resulting in a net conversion of heat energy to mechanical work.
Robert Stirling was a Scottish clergyman and engineer. He invented the Stirling engine and was inducted into the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame in 2014.
The Stirling cycle is a thermodynamic cycle that describes the general class of Stirling devices. This includes the original Stirling engine that was invented, developed and patented in 1816 by Robert Stirling with help from his brother, an engineer.
Thermoacoustic engines are thermoacoustic devices which use high-amplitude sound waves to pump heat from one place to another or use a heat difference to produce work in the form of sound waves.
A refrigerator designed to reach cryogenic temperatures is often called a cryocooler. The term is most often used for smaller systems, typically table-top size, with input powers less than about 20 kW. Some can have input powers as low as 2–3 W. Large systems, such as those used for cooling the superconducting magnets in particle accelerators are more often called cryogenic refrigerators. Their input powers can be as high as 1 MW. In most cases cryocoolers use a cryogenic fluid as the working substance and employ moving parts to cycle the fluid around a thermodynamic cycle. The fluid is typically compressed at room temperature, precooled in a heat exchanger, then expanded at some low temperature. The returning low-pressure fluid passes through the heat exchanger to precool the high-pressure fluid before entering the compressor intake. The cycle is then repeated.
The Ericsson cycle is named after inventor John Ericsson who designed and built many unique heat engines based on various thermodynamic cycles. He is credited with inventing two unique heat engine cycles and developing practical engines based on these cycles. His first cycle is now known as the closed Brayton cycle, while his second cycle is what is now called the Ericsson cycle. Ericsson is one of the few who built open-cycle engines, but he also built closed-cycle ones.
A hot air engine is any heat engine that uses the expansion and contraction of air under the influence of a temperature change to convert thermal energy into mechanical work. These engines may be based on a number of thermodynamic cycles encompassing both open cycle devices such as those of Sir George Cayley and John Ericsson and the closed cycle engine of Robert Stirling. Hot air engines are distinct from the better known internal combustion based engine and steam engine.
A Fluidyne engine is an alpha or gamma type Stirling engine with one or more liquid pistons. It contains a working gas, and either two liquid pistons or one liquid piston and a displacer.
A regenerative heat exchanger, or more commonly a regenerator, is a type of heat exchanger where heat from the hot fluid is intermittently stored in a thermal storage medium before it is transferred to the cold fluid. To accomplish this the hot fluid is brought into contact with the heat storage medium, then the fluid is displaced with the cold fluid, which absorbs the heat.
The Harwell TMG Stirling engine, an abbreviation for "Thermo-Mechanical Generator", was invented in 1967 by E. H. Cooke-Yarborough at the Harwell Labs of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. It was intended to be a remote electrical power source with low cost and very long life, albeit by sacrificing some efficiency. The TMG was at one time the only Stirling engine sold by a manufacturer, namely HoMach Systems Ltd., England.
The first recorded rudimentary steam engine was the aeolipile mentioned by Vitruvius between 30 and 15 BC and, described by Heron of Alexandria in 1st-century Roman Egypt. Several steam-powered devices were later experimented with or proposed, such as Taqi al-Din's steam jack, a steam turbine in 16th-century Ottoman Egypt, Denis Papin's working model of the steam digester in 1679 and Thomas Savery's steam pump in 17th-century England. In 1712, Thomas Newcomen's atmospheric engine became the first commercially successful engine using the principle of the piston and cylinder, which was the fundamental type of steam engine used until the early 20th century. The steam engine was used to pump water out of coal mines.
Radiators are heat exchangers used for cooling internal combustion engines, mainly in automobiles but also in piston-engined aircraft, railway locomotives, motorcycles, stationary generating plants or any similar use of such an engine.
A vacuum engine refers to any kind of engine which derives its force from air pressure against one side of the piston, while also having a partial vacuum on the other side of it. This pressure differential can be the result of heat transfer, or mechanically produced by an external source.
Applications of the Stirling engine range from mechanical propulsion to heating and cooling to electrical generation systems. A Stirling engine is a heat engine operating by cyclic compression and expansion of air or other gas, the "working fluid", at different temperature levels such that there is a net conversion of heat to mechanical work. The Stirling cycle heat engine can also be driven in reverse, using a mechanical energy input to drive heat transfer in a reversed direction.
An internal combustion engine is a heat engine in which the combustion of a fuel occurs with an oxidizer in a combustion chamber that is an integral part of the working fluid flow circuit. In an internal combustion engine, the expansion of the high-temperature and high-pressure gases produced by combustion applies direct force to some component of the engine. The force is typically applied to pistons, turbine blades, a rotor, or a nozzle. This force moves the component over a distance, transforming chemical energy into kinetic energy which is used to propel, move or power whatever the engine is attached to.
A Manson-Guise engine is a simplified, albeit less powerful version of a Manson engine. It is a type of hot air engine, converting a temperature difference into motion. There is a hot side and a cold side to the engine. Providing there is a large enough temperature difference between the two sides the engine will run. The Manson-Guise engine is probably the simplest type of hot air engines having only a single con-rod, with a displacer piston and power piston that move at the same time. Manson-Guise engines, like Manson engines and beta Stirling engines, can run bidirectionally.
The Manson engine is a hot air engine that was first described by A. D. Manson in the March 1952 issue of Newnes Practical Mechanics-Magazines. Manson engines can be started in either direction. It has a stepped piston. The front part acts as a displacer and the back part acts as a work piston. The engine only requires three moving parts: piston, piston rod, and crank.