Herbert Akroyd Stuart
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Herbert Akroyd-Stuart (January 28, 1864, Halifax Yorkshire, England - February 19, 1927, Halifax)
Inventor of the hot bulb heavy oil engine.
He had lived in Australia in his early years. He was educated at Newbury Grammar School and Finsbury Technical College on Cowper Street. His first prototypes were built in 1886. His engines were built from June 26th 1891 by Richard Hornsby and Sons of Grantham, Lincolnshire, England under the title Hornsby Akroyd Patent Oil Engine under licence and were first sold commercially on May 8th 1892.
Similar engines were built by Bolinder in Sweden and some of these still survive in canal boats. Hot bulb engines in the USA were made by De La Vergne Company of New York, later the New York Refrigerating Company - inventing the modern refrigerator in 1930, who purchased a licence in 1893.
Richard Hornsby and Sons built the world's first oil-engined railway locomotive LACHESIS for the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, England, in 1896. They also built the first compression-ignition powered automobile.
Akroyd Stuart in 1885 accidentally spilt paraffin into a pot of molten tin. The paraffin vaporised and caught fire when in contact with a lamp. This gave him an idea to pursue the possibility of using paraffin (very similar to modern-day diesel) for an engine.
The modern Diesel engine is a hybrid incorporating the features of direct (airless) injection and compression-ignition both patented (Number 7164) by Akroyd-Stuart in May 1890. Rudolf Diesel patented compression-ignition in 1892. Diesel's laborious injection system where combustion was produced isobarically, the technique having been patented by George Brayton in 1874 for his carburettor, was not subsumed into later engines with Akroyd-Stuart's injection system with isochoric combustion developed at Hornsbys being the blueprint for diesel engine ignition instead. Akroyd-Stuart's compression ignition engine (compared to spark-ignition) was patented two years earlier than Diesel's similar engine. Diesel's only patentable idea was to increase the pressure. The hot bulb engine, due to the lower pressures used (around 280 PSI), had only about a 12% thermal efficiency.
In 1892, he patented a water-jacketed vaporiser to allow compression ratios to be increased. In the same year, T.H. Barton at Hornsbys built a working high-compression version for experimental purposes whereby the vaporiser was replaced with a cylinder head therefore not relying on air being preheated, but by combustion through higher compression ratios. It ran for six hours - the first time automatic ignition was secured by merely compression. This was five years before Rudolf Diesel built his well-known high-compression prototype engine in 1897. Diesel was credited with the innovation even in documented hindsight of Akroyd-Stuart beating him to the finishing post.
In 1900, he moved to Australia and set up a company Sanders & Stuart with his brother Charles, latterly moving back to Yorkshire. He died of throat cancer and was buried in All Souls church in Boothtown, Halifax.
The University of Nottingham has hosted the Akroyd-Stuart Memorial Lecture on occasional years in his memory since 1928. One was presented by Sir Frank Whittle in 1946 (when the first jet planes were built). Akroyd Stuart had worked with Professor William Robinson in the late 1800s, who was professor of engineering from 1890 to 1924 at University College Nottingham. Akroyd Stuart also left money to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Royal Aeronautical Society and Institute of Marine Engineering, which provided for their respective bi-annual Akroyd-Stuart Prizes.
