Ignoramus30160 wrote:


I also wanted to suggest farting, but thought that it would be too
much after recommending a fart driven internal combustion engine
recently.


Might make for a bizarre external combustion engine though.

I attended the last New England Model Engineering Society's show and
amidst the ubiquitous steam and Sterling engine models I found an engine
type I'd never heard about before.

It looked like just another single cylinder horizontal steam engine, but
there was a hole in the middle of the head which was valved by a
pivoting shutter blade timed off the crankshaft.

A small alcohol burner was positioned so that its flame was adjacent to
that valve. The valve pivoted open when the piston was moving away from
TDC, sucking hot gases into the cylinder.

The valve closed near BDC and the gases cooled and developed a negative
pressure so the atmospheric pressure on the back of the piston pushed it
back towards TDC.

It was spinning away like mad, and the proud builder described it as an
"atmospheric" engine. The only atmospheric engines I'd heard about
before used condensing steam in a similar fashion, but seeing one
running by sucking flame directly into the cylinder like that was a gas.

Jeff

--
Jeffry Wisnia

(W1BSV + Brass Rat '57 EE)

"Truth exists; only falsehood has to be invented."