Page 10 - Piston Engine-Based Power Plants

An Introduction to Piston Engine Power Plants 3

is particularly important for transportation applications such as road
vehicles but also makes them useful for the wide range of power gener-
ation applications noted above.

The main drawback of these engines is that they generally require the
combustion of a fossil fuel to provide the energy needed to drive them.
In consequence they represent a major source of atmospheric carbon
dioxide emissions across the globe and contribute significantly to the
quantity of this gas that is released into the atmosphere each year. In
addition both types of internal combustion engine, but particularly die-
sel engines, are sources of a range of other pollutants. Where these
engines are used for stationary applications such as power generation it
is feasible to apply advanced techniques to clean the exhaust gases and
reduce their atmospheric emissions of carbon dioxide. However this is
not cost effective for smaller, mobile-scale applications such as for cars.
In consequence there is a major industrial effort taking place to find a
cleaner replacement for transportation applications. Candidates include
fuel cell-powered vehicles and battery-powered vehicles.

THE HISTORY OF THE PISTON ENGINE

The earliest references to the concept of a piston engine can be found
in the 17th century when the French inventor Jean de Hautefeuille pro-
posed a device that would use gunpowder as the fuel to drive a piston
in a cylinder as a means of generating mechanical energy. This device
operated using single charges of gunpowder and would have had to be
recharged before each cycle so would have been of limited use as an
engine for providing useful work. There is no evidence that
Hautefeuille actually built his device but the Netherlands’ scientist
Christiaan Huygens may have attempted to do so. Material limitations
would, anyway, have made it difficult to develop an engine using this
principle at that time. Nevertheless, Hautefeuille’s proposal appears to
have been the first mention of both a piston engine and the idea of an
internal combustion engine.
While the materials were not available to build successful engines of
this type, another proposal from the 17th century did gain traction, an
external combustion engine using steam as the working fluid. One of
the earliest contributors to this line of development was another French
scientist, Denis Papin. He put forward the idea of using steam as a