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Saturday, October 27, 2012

Nothing New

1906 Compound
Scott sent me a link to an article about this very pretty car. There are several things to note about this one. It got a "Gold Star" restoration when it was at Harrah's some time ago. That's why it looks so nice. It currently lives at a museum in Fairbanks, Alaska. I was surprised to hear that there was such an establishment in Fairbanks. Lastly it has a compound gas engine, which is where it got its name.

Overhead view of engine in the 1906 Compound

Compounding involves having a second cylinder to extract more work from the exhaust gas from the primary cylinder. Steam engines have been doing it forever. People experimented with it with gas engines for a few decades around 1900, but it didn't pan out economically. That is, a compound engine cost too much for the small amount of extra horsepower it delivered. Probably weighed too much to boot.

THE BALES COMPOUND GAS ENGINE PATENT: 1897
This cutaway drawing is of a different engine, but the principle is the same. The cylinders on either end operate like a conventional four stroke, internal combustion engine. When these primary cylinders complete their power stroke, the exhaust gas is piped to the center cylinder where the still expanding exhaust gases can do a bit more work.

Update February 2018. Added captions to pictures, which give the here-to-for unmentioned name of the car.

2 comments:

Tam said...

Rotary motion is more efficient than reciprocating motion. (At least when it comes to extracting energy from exhaust gasses, apparently...)

Chuck Pergiel said...

Took me a while to figure out that you were talking about turbochargers. It's Sunday, I'm a little slow.