Steve Candelaria
Melancon
Diesel Course 021
1/20/2015
Rudolf Diesel Essay Rudolf Diesel was born in Paris in 1858. Through his work on engines he was able to change how they ran. After working on an engine for over 15 years he changed how it ran, mainly by finding a way to make the steam engine obsolete and to produce more of a workload output from the engines. Rudolf Diesel changed the known world with one simple, but complex engine. His parents were immigrants from Bavaria. After graduating from Munich Polytechnic he was employed as a refrigerator engineer under one of his professors named Carl Von Linde. Though employed, he gradually worked on different theories and ideas trying to come up with what would become the diesel engine.
In 1893, he published a paper describing an engine with combustion within a cylinder, the internal combustion engine. Diesel filed for a patent for his new invention in 1894 and although his machine almost cost him his life when it exploded directly in front of him he continued his efforts. Despite the explosion, the internal combustion engine was the first that proved that fuel can be ignited without a spark. By 1897 he was able to fully and successfully operate his best version of the diesel engine.
A gasoline engine intakes a mixture of gas and air then compresses it and ignites the mixture with a spark. A diesel engine takes in just air, compresses it and then injects fuel into the compressed air which makes the heat of the compressed air light the fuel. There are many similarities between the gasoline engine and the diesel engine but there is also a significant difference. One main difference is in the injection process.
Gasoline engines