Abstract
At the beginning of the 20th century the operational issues of the Otto engine had not been fully resolved. The work presented here seeks to chronicle the development of one of the alternative design pathways, namely the replacement for the gas exchange mechanism of the more conventional poppet valve arrangement with that of a sleeve valve. There have been several successful engines built with these devices, which have a number of attractive features superior to poppet valves. This review moves from the initial work of Charles Knight, Peter Burt, and James McCollum, in the first decade of the 20th century, through the work of others to develop a two-stroke version of the sleeve-valve engine, which climaxed in the construction of one of the most powerful piston aeroengines ever built, the Rolls-Royce Crecy. After that period of high activity in the 1940s, there have been limited further developments. The patent efforts changed over time from design of two-stroke sleeve-drive mechanisms through to cylinder head cooling and improvements in the control of the thermal expansion of the relative components to improve durability. These documents provide a foundation for a design of an internal combustion engine with potentially high thermal efficiency.
Highlights
If the internal combustion engine is to play any part in combating the environmental pressures on personal mobility in the third decade of the 21st Century it will require that automotive engineers review all technologies likely to produce low-cost engines which do minimum harm to the environment
Their results were greatly affected by the gas exchange limits imposed by the use of poppet valves in their designs
Which up to that time had either used steam-engine-like slide valves or the poppet valves that are ubiquitous today. The first of these was his vertical moving sleeve arrangement shown (Figure 1) as per patent US968166 of April 1904 [3]. He further improved his ideas in his patent US1090991 of 4 June 1906 [4] (Figure 2) proposing that the poppet valves be replaced by a pair of thin sliding liners which surrounded the piston, these nested inside each other and were driven up and down by separate cranks at half engine speed
Summary
If the internal combustion engine is to play any part in combating the environmental pressures on personal mobility in the third decade of the 21st Century it will require that automotive engineers review all technologies likely to produce low-cost engines which do minimum harm to the environment. In summary, during the war years, the engine manufacturers and the oil industry developed an understanding on how to solve a number of the major poppet valve engine problems These included optimising of cam profiles, the use of sodium-cooled exhaust valves, and understanding of fuel knock behaviours to improve engine knock limits. These were partly achieved with the introduction of leaded gasoline blends which allowed higher compression/expansion ratios to be used in the engines for the same boost level and lower exhaust gas temperatures. No new automotive sleeve valve engines were produced after the war and the technology has been partly forgotten
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