The Long Mingling or Ripening Spark
I agree. This is a good thread.
The notion of a cooling effect within the gasoline engine by a "change-of-state" of the fuel charge inside the cylinder is a very old one. The controversy that goes with it is nearly as old as the gasoline engine itself.
The following comes from an old manuscript of mine about E.J. Pennington's supposed breakthrough 1895 discovery: "the long ripening or mingling spark."
It's given here purely for your entertainment in this mind-numbing quest to understand the infernal alchemy and hellish physics within the hydrocarbon engine. Bear in mind that the historical events described here took place in the late 19th century when people didn't yet knew the proper ratio between high-octane science and snake-oil. Maybe we still don't know. Nor what height boots to wear...
Max2Cam (Herb)
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From: "Airship Pennington and the Motor Cycle"
On the publicity of his demonstration of the Motor Cycle in Milwaukee, Pennington returned to Racine like a conquering hero. Over 200 orders for his engine poured in. New sizes of two to ten horsepower were promised in various layouts including a V-four. Stories about the Motor Cycle were widely circulated in the press and reporters thronged to Racine for interviews, but few were admitted into the great inventor's presence or allowed to see the Pennington engine up close. One visitor not turned away, however, was a reporter for the American Machinist, a young man named John Randol.
Sceptical at first, Randol soon fell under the influence of the "Elixir Hypnotique a Pennington." Mere days before the Chicago Times-Herald motor-vehicle contest took place, Randol's article hit the street. He wrote, "I saw...a heat engine of such exquisite simplicity that...a child might use [the pieces] for play-things; a machine...that...should not be able to even move itself; yet this incredible machine not only did move itself, but moved with such vigor of action as to drive loads far beyond its apparent possibilites."
Randol's article was the first detailed account of the Pennington engine and was simultaneously sceptical and yet fawning. Although Randol called Pennington's explanation for the engine's apparent super-efficiency at first glance "a ridiculously impossible theory," like so many others he was (in his own words), "first incredulous and then amazed, and finally enthusiastic."
Pennington's explanation was elegant in its simplicity. His gasoline engine needed no fins or water-jacket due to his unique discovery that waste heat from a typical internal combustion engine could be converted into useful work upon the piston. This discovery was Pennington's "long mingling (or ripening) spark," a patent application for which he had applied for that May. As experience is the best teacher, Pennington first took Randol for a fast ride on the tandem Motor Cycle over Racine's brick paved streets and across some railroad tracks near the factory. The experience appears to have satisfied Randol's lust for speed as a motorcycle passenger and he called Pennington's gasoline-powered bicycle "a demonical and demon driven" machine.
Afterwards at the factory Pennington cooled Randol's frayed nerves with French champagne, and sometime later permitted the reporter to feel the Motor Cycle's cylinders who found them "surprisingly cool" to the touch.
In fact this machine had the newly water-jacketed engine with just enough cruising range to scare the bejesus out of Randol, but the great inventor shamelessly pronounced that his engine actually ran better with "naked" cylinders. Then Pennington launced into an explanation of his greatest breakthough to date: the long mingling or ripening spark.
However many drinks Randol may have consumed by this time, he was now all ears. What he heard amounted to a mechanical revelation. Because the inventor now revealed to Randol that the spark of ignition during the power-stroke in the Pennington engine did not take place until the crank was 45 degrees past top-dead-center. Previous to this 45-degree ignition spark, however, another critical event took place within the cylinder. This was the addition of another spark in\0troduced earlier in the cylinder and that Pennington dubbed the "mingling spark."
According to Pennington this early spark did not ignite the fuel charge, but instead transformed the liquid hydrocarbon fuel into a vapor. Not only did this vaporization spark insure more perfect combustion that greatly increased engine power, but Pennington also proclaimed that according to the immutable natural laws of physics that during a change-of-state when a fluid is converted into a vapor vast amounts of heat are taken up by that process. This was the well-understood principle upon which refrigeration is based. Thus, with his premature non-igniting spark, Pennington claimed to have achieved an internal refrigeration effect inside the engine that was so effective that the cylinder and piston temperatures were kept at wonderfully safe levels.
Whether Randol totally believed Pennington's explanation remains an open question. But the reporter was clearly convinced that amazing results had been achieved. Randol stated that, "nothing approaching the weight and power given has ever been shown by any motor within the general knowledge of the public...No fire, no water, no boiler, no carburetor; only a few pieces of steel with a few brass-bushed joints, a battery weighing one pound, and a gallon of kerosene, put these with a bicycle, bringing the weight of the whole piece of wizardry up to 58 pounds, and a man may be carried by it on a smooth road a mile in 58 seconds, as a man was carried...in the city of Milwaukee a few days since."
Indeed smitten, Randol then gave his opinion of Pennington's breakthrough discovery. "The efficiency of the Pennington motor," wrote Randol, "lies in the effect of the first spark. This statement is as incredible to my mind now as when I first heard it from the lips of Mr. Pennington [and] the only agency through which this motor achieves its miraculous results...and so opens a new round of dazzling possibilities to the engineer."
Well?
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