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Michael Zakharian P5 Auto shop Rudolf Diesel Biography In the mid to late 1800's, during the begging of the

industrial revolution, many new innovations and inventors emerge through out Europe and America. There were new needs for people in the world, and two of the most important where transportation, and a stable energy source for people. Many men pondered upon ideas and ways to innovate, but very few succeeded, and one of those few was a man by the name of Rudolf Diesel. Rudolf Diesel contribution to the world was the Diesel engine, which changed the way people got power and moved form place to place, and it was one of the most important inventions in the automotive industry. Rudolf Diesel was born in Paris France in 1858. His parents where immigrants form Germany, they where from the Bavarian region. He was one of three children, and he was the shy one.His parents where bookbinders, which meant that they bound and sold in Germany and France. They where a part of the lower bourgeoise class, which meant that they where middle class people. He grew up in Paris , and attended lower level school there, and was developing a good education. He was fluent in German as well as French. He soon met his wife , who was the daughter of a Nuremberg merchant, and was a bit wealthier than him. Diesel was very happy with his life in France, until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, which has a war between France and Prussia, which is part of modern day Germany. The war made made the Germans and the French political and social enemies, and led to a series of laws and events that discriminated against the German people in France, and the French in Germans in France. People where not allowed in certain public places, and eventually, the French issued a law that forced all German immigrants to move back to their home towns, and this made Diesel have to flee France.He and His family fled to London until the end of the war in 1871, but his mother decided it would be best if he went to live with his aunt and uncle in Augsburg, Germany. He was 12 years old at the time. His Uncle was a very educated man and taught him mathematics , and sent him to trading school in Germany. Diesel soon became more interested in Mathematics and physics more than anything else. He decided that he wanted to become an engineer when he grew up, so he write a letter to his Family, now in england, about his choice. His family did not give him a lot of support because they did not believe that it was possible to survive on that career, only because it was not very popular. He continued to study in school and expressed his interest in engineering. He was a very studious, and eventually got a merit scholarship from the Royal Bavarian Polytechnic of Munich. This school was one of the the best in the higher eduction system in

Germany at the time. His parents resented his choice, they believed that it would be best for him to start school and get a job and begin making a family and having kids. Diesel went against his family's wishes and began attending school. He began his studies with basic physics and physical chemistry. His math began to evolve with the new information he was gathering from the school. He began to ponder upon newtons laws and Boyle's gas laws. He was on a steady pace to graduation until he fell ill with typhoid . He fell back in many classes because it took him months to recover from, and was not able to graduate with his class in 1879 because of it. While studying one extra year, Diesel went to get some practical experience at a large machine shop in Switzerland. This allowed him to get extra credits and graduate from his school with an honorary diploma, one if the highest anyone can achieve. He then returned to Paris , where he began to work with his professor, Carl von Linde. Linde has making many new projects and needed the assistance of Diesel for his designs. One of them was the design for a modern refrigeration system. It was very difficult because not thermodynamics where very difficult to apply to the project. Linde had a plant in Paris, and because of Diesels work in his projects, made Diesel the director of the Plant one year after his return to Paris. He became very well known, and gained many patents in both Germany and France. In 1890, Diesel moved to Berlin, where he made new improvement on the ideas that he had about many new innovations. He was still working with Linde , and had invested a great deal of time into research and management of the factories that he owned. There where many patents that where made while Diesel was working with Linde, and he was not allowed to use the patents for his own good, this meant that those patents where a part of Linde's company rights , and he had no rights to them. This caused him to start to look elsewhere for innovations. So he strayed away from the exclusivity of Linde's company and began to look away for only the innovations of refrigeration, and into new territory. He began to work with steam, and did a lot of research with it. He began to ponder upon the properties of a liquid when it was heated, and made many discoveries because of his research. He discovered that there was a way to harvest the energy form heated substances for the use of more practical things. He discovered that energy could be harvested from steam, and his led to his experiments with ammonia vapor, and the development of the very first stem engine. The engine had many flaws, however, it was not very efficient, it needed a large amount of raw materials to operate, but them, Diesel found that there are ratios of mixtures that must be held in the engine to keep it working, and he began to mix these ratios to find one that would keep the engine running, and at the same time require as little as possible raw materials to run. He ran multiple tests to get the results that he wanted, and used many dangerous chemicals , which could explode under high pressures, and because of this, he was involved

in an accident that almost killed him. The accident hospitalized him for many months, and took time away from his research. He had many problems with his internal organs, his hearing and his eyesight also had many problems after the accident. This led to many more problems that did not allow him to get back to work for many more months after he was released form the hospital. When he was released, he realized that there where other scientists experimenting with engines, and was shocked. He realized that he needed to pull himself together and work to get an actual product from all his research out so that he could be credited for all of his hard work. There where two other scientists that where tampering with the ideas of the engine where Karl Benz and Daimler. About 1890 Diesel saw that air could be used as the working fluid and worked out the elements of his engine cycle. Air, highly compressed in a cylinder, would rise in temperature; fuel injected into this hot gas would burn spontaneously. Ideally, combustion would occur at constant temperature and pressure, and expansion of the gases would drive the piston. Thus the conversion of heat to work would reach an optimum. Diesel's design was sufficiently advanced for him to patent it in 1892, and he described it in the paper "The Theory and Design of a Rational Heat Engine" (1893). With Linde's support two outstanding German concerns, Maschinenfabrik, Augsburg, and Friedrich Krupp, Essen, agreed to finance its development. From 1893 Diesel worked on the engine at Augsburg. By 1897 the engine was perfected to Diesel's satisfaction, and it was displayed in the Munich Exhibition of 1898. It used a heavier fuel oil than the then relatively explosive gasoline engines with which it was to compete. Its fuel economy was remarkable, and it ran quietly. This engine took years to perfect, along with thousands of dollars for experimentation and patenting. Diesel understood that this could revolutionize the market, so he went forth with. He did have many people who supported him, and saw that there was not only great money to be made, but he could also accumulate a great deal of respect along with all the money. He did this after Benz had created the first automobile in 1887, utilizing the internal combustion engine. Diesel's work led many companies and investors to form a syndicate with Krupp in April 1893 to manufacture a 2-cylinder, 50-horsepower engine. But Diesel and his backers were unable to produce a smoothly running prototype until 1897. For that to happen, Diesel modified many of the fundamentals of his original theoretical design. The working engine operated at much higher pressures (18 to 33 atmospheres); ran on kerosene (instead of any liquefied or pulverized fuel) and at a new fuel-air mix; used compressed air rather than solid injection; and, most importantly, did not operate at constant pressure. After announcing the success and imminent commercialization of his engine at the June 1897 meeting of the Society of German Engineers, Diesel began seeking licensees throughout the industrialized world. Three German

companies bought patent rights, as did several non-German firms and individuals, including brewing magnate Adolphus Busch in the United States. The Augsburg company managed to produce a reliable 60-horsepower model by 1902. But Diesel's foreign licensees continued to struggle, despite drawings and engineering assistance from Augsburg. Busch's company produced a mere 260 engines between 1902 and 1912, when its license expired, the diesel venture having cost the family millions of dollars. Meanwhile, Rudolph Diesel's growing fame was haunted by a series of personal and business setbacks. Working to the point of exhaustion, he required months of recuperation in a sanitarium from late 1898 to early 1899 and again in 19011902. Some of his people pointedly challenged the originality of his work, claiming that Diesel's engines operated on principals articulated by others, not on the inventor's original concepts. A poor financial manager, Diesel nevertheless maintained a lavish villa in Munich called Jugendstil. In 1913, when he boarded the steamship Dresden at Antwerp, bound for England, Diesel faced financial ruin. He was facing many problems with his family and has in a state of depression. He had realized that he had worked thorough most of his life , and did not really stop to think abut anything else. His economic setbacks also had a great effect on him, he was not able to become the man that he had once dreamed of, even with all of his hard work and dedication. He was at an event one evening and sometime during the evening of September 30, he disappeared from the ship's deck. His body was recovered ten days later, and all signs pointed to suicide. Although Diesel had a tragic death, there where many things that he did that changed the engine industry forever. His ideas on thermodynamics, which had to do with the efficient ratios, are still used in many engineering schools today. The diesel engine that he developed, had replaces many steam engines that where being used on boats and other machinery. The diesel engine could have had greater impact, be there where many drawbacks of the diesel engine compared to a internal combustion engine. One of them was that it was heavier, weight was very important for development many vehicles, and the less the weight , the faster and more efficient the vehicle would be. This meant that the Diesel engine could not be used with many cars and airplanes, because it was way to heavy. But today, with the introduction of many new biodeisels, and alternative fuels, the diesel engine has become much more efficient that the internal combustion engine, and has become one of the most commonly used engines on trucks, trains, suv'sboats, submarines, and even regular cars! Because of the design of the diesel engine, much less gas is required to get the energy needed to move an automobile and any other vehicle.

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