1.
Matthew Boulton
Matthew Boulton FRS was an English manufacturer and business partner of Scottish engineer James Watt. Boulton applied modern techniques to the minting of coins, striking millions of pieces for Britain and other countries, born in Birmingham, he was the son of a Birmingham manufacturer of small metal products who died when Boulton was 31. By Boulton had managed the business for years, and thereafter expanded it considerably, consolidating operations at the Soho Manufactory. At Soho, he adopted the latest techniques, branching into silver plate, ormolu and he became associated with James Watt when Watts business partner, John Roebuck, was unable to pay a debt to Boulton, who accepted Roebucks share of Watts patent as settlement. He successfully lobbied Parliament to extend Watts patent for an additional 17 years, the firm installed hundreds of Boulton & Watt steam engines in Britain and abroad, initially in mines and in factories. Boulton was a key member of the Lunar Society, a group of Birmingham-area men prominent in the arts, members included Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood and Joseph Priestley.
The Society met each month near the full moon, Boulton founded the Soho Mint, to which he soon adapted steam power. He sought to improve the state of Britains coinage. His cartwheel pieces were well-designed and difficult to counterfeit, and included the first striking of the large copper British penny and he retired in 1800, though continuing to run his mint, and died in 1809. His image appears alongside James Watt on the Bank of Englands new Series F £50 note, Birmingham had long been a centre of the ironworking industry. In the early 18th century the town entered a period of expansion as iron working became easier and cheaper with the transition from charcoal to coke as a means of smelting iron. Scarcity of wood in increasingly deforested England and discoveries of large quantities of coal in Birminghams county of Warwickshire, much of the iron was forged in small foundries near Birmingham, especially in the Black Country, including nearby towns such as Smethwick and West Bromwich. The resultant thin iron sheets were transported to factories in and around Birmingham, with the town far from the sea and great rivers and with canals not yet built, metalworkers concentrated on producing small, relatively valuable pieces, especially buttons and buckles.
Frenchman Alexander Missen wrote that while he had seen excellent cane heads, snuff boxes and other objects in Milan. These small objects came to be known as toys, and their manufacturers as toymakers, Boulton was a descendant of families from around Lichfield, his great-great-great-great grandfather, Rev. Zachary Babington, having been Chancellor of Lichfield. Boultons father, named Matthew and born in 1700, moved to Birmingham from Lichfield to serve an apprenticeship, the elder Boulton was a toymaker with a small workshop specialising in buckles. Matthew Boulton was born in 1728, their child and the second of that name. The elder Boultons business prospered after young Matthews birth, and the moved to the Snow Hill area of Birmingham
2.
Six-bar linkage
A six-bar linkage is a one degree-of-freedom mechanism that is constructed from six links and seven joints. An example is the Klann linkage used to drive the legs of a walking machine, in general, each joint of a linkage connects two links, and a binary link supports two joints. This type of linkage is said to have the Watt topology. This again creates two ternary links that are now separated by one or more binary links and this type of six-bar linkage is said to have the Stephenson topology. The Klann linkage has the Stephenson topology and this configuration of a six bars and seven joints has two four-bar loops. The six-bars and seven joints of the Stephenson linkage comprise one four-bar loop and it has two ternary links that are separated by a binary link. This means the two links are not connected to each other by a joint as in the case of the Watt topology. The Stephenson has three forms depending on the link that is selected as the frame, which are denoted Stephenson I, animations of six-bar linkage for a bicycle suspension.
A variety of six-bar linkage designs, lecture on the design of six-bar and eight-bar linkages Article about patents and six-bar linkages
3.
Chebyshev's Lambda Mechanism
The Chebyshevs Lambda Mechanism is a four-bar mechanism that converts rotational motion to approximate straight-line motion with approximate constant velocity. The precise design trades off straightness, lack of acceleration, the example to the right spends over half of the cycle in the near straight portion. The Chebyshevs Lambda Mechanism is a linkage of the Chebyshev linkage. The linkage was first shown in Paris on the Exposition Universelle as The Plantigrade Machine, the Chebyshevs Lambda Mechanism looks like the Greek letter lambda, therefore the linkage is known as Lambda Mechanism. Alexdenouden. nl - Rectilinear motion after Tchebychev A simulation using the Molecular Workbench software How does a Hoeckens Linkage Work
4.
Linkage (mechanical)
A mechanical linkage is an assembly of bodies connected to manage forces and movement. The movement of a body, or link, is studied using geometry so the link is considered to be rigid, the connections between links are modeled as providing ideal movement, pure rotation or sliding for example, and are called joints. A linkage modeled as a network of links and ideal joints is called a kinematic chain. Linkages may be constructed from open chains, closed chains, or a combination of open, each link in a chain is connected by a joint to one or more other links. Thus, a chain can be modeled as a graph in which the links are paths and the joints are vertices. The movement of a joint is generally associated with a subgroup of the group of Euclidean displacements. The number of parameters in the subgroup is called the degrees of freedom of the joint, mechanical linkages are usually designed to transform a given input force and movement into a desired output force and movement. The ratio of the force to the input force is known as the mechanical advantage of the linkage.
The speed ratio and mechanical advantage are defined so they yield the number in an ideal linkage. A kinematic chain, in which one link is fixed or stationary, is called a mechanism, perhaps the simplest linkage is the lever, which is a link that pivots around a fulcrum attached to ground, or a fixed point. As a force rotates the lever, points far from the fulcrum have a greater velocity than points near the fulcrum. Because power into the lever equals the power out, a force applied at a point far from the fulcrum equals a larger force applied at a point near the fulcrum. The amount the force is amplified is called mechanical advantage and this is the law of the lever. Two levers connected by a rod so that a force applied to one is transmitted to the second is known as a four-bar linkage, the levers are called cranks, and the fulcrums are called pivots. The connecting rod is called the coupler, the fourth bar in this assembly is the ground, or frame, on which the cranks are mounted. Linkages are important components of machines and tools, examples range from the four-bar linkage used to amplify force in a bolt cutter or to provide independent suspension in an automobile, to complex linkage systems in robotic arms and walking machines.
The internal combustion engine uses a slider-crank four-bar linkage formed from its piston, connecting rod, relatively simple linkages are often used to perform complicated tasks. Interesting examples of linkages include the windshield wiper, the bicycle suspension, in these examples the components in the linkage move in parallel planes and are called planar linkages
5.
Crossness Pumping Station
It is adjacent to Erith Marshes, a grazing marsh, the northern part of which is designated as Crossness Nature Reserve. This provides a habitat for creatures ranging from moths to small amphibians. At Crossness, the liquid was raised some 30 to 40 feet by the application of four large steam driven pumps. The engines were of enormous size and power and they were built by James Watt & Co. to Joseph Bazalgettes designs and specification, and were named Victoria, Prince Consort, Albert Edward and Alexandra. At 11 revolutions per minute,6 tons of sewage per stroke per engine were pumped up into a 27-million-imperial-gallon reservoir, in 1891, sedimentation tanks were added to the works, and the sludge was carried by steam boats and dumped further out into the estuary, at sea. They were converted from simple to compound engines with the original single cylinders were augmented by high, the additional steam required was provided by replacing the earlier Cornish boilers by more efficient Lancashire boilers with double flues and in 1901 the improved engines were fully working.
The pumping station became a Grade I listed building in 1970, the Crossness Engines Trust, a registered charity, was formed in 1987 to oversee the restoration project which was due to be completed in 2013. When the pumping station was decommissioned in the 1950s it was not considered economic to dismantle the engines as the cost of doing so far exceeded any scrap value. The more valuable items such as the engine oilers, much pipework. The remaining building and engines were left to suffer considerable vandalism, as Prince Consort was to the last steam engine to run, in 1953, it is this engine on which the restoration activity has been concentrated. After some fifteen years of effort the engine is now working again and is run on the open days organised by the Trust. When the buildings were abandoned, the pumps and culverts and all the ground level areas below the Beam Engine House were filled with sand to reduce the risks from methane. This has meant that some 100 tons of sand has had to be excavated from around and underneath the pumps before there was any hope of moving the beam.
Further, there was a considerable ingress of water which has resulted in serious rusting of the engine parts. The station contains the four original pumping engines, which are thought to be the largest remaining rotative beam engines in the world, Prince Consort was returned to steam in 2003 and now runs on Trust Open Days. The other engines are not in working order, although work has begun on the restoration of Victoria, the original boilers did not survive and Prince Consort is now steamed by a small off the shelf boiler. This boiler has nowhere near the capacity of the originals. Having received over £2 million in funding, including, in 2008
6.
Parallel motion
The parallel motion is a mechanical linkage invented by the Scottish engineer James Watt in 1784 for the double-acting Watt steam engine. It allows a rod moving straight up and down to transmit motion to a beam moving in an arc, without putting sideways strain on the rod. In Watts new double-acting engine, the produced power on both the upward and downward strokes, so a chain could not be used to transmit the force to the beam. Watt designed the parallel motion to force in both directions whilst keeping the piston rod vertical. He called it parallel motion because both the piston and the rod were required to move vertically, parallel to one another. In a letter to his son in 1808 describing how he arrived at the design, the sketch he included actually shows what is now known as Watts linkage which was a linkage described in Watts 1784 patent but it was immediately superseded by the parallel motion. The parallel motion differed from Watts linkage by having an additional pantograph linkage incorporated in the design and this did not affect the fundamental principle but it allowed the engine room to be smaller because the linkage was more compact.
See the diagram on the right, a is the journal of the walking beam KAC, which rocks up and down about A. H is the piston, which is required to move vertically, the heart of the design is the four-bar linkage consisting of AB, BE and EG and the base link is AG, both joints on the framework of the engine. As the beam rocks, point F describes an elongated figure-of-eight in mid-air, since the motion of the walking beam is constrained to a small angle, F describes only a short section of the figure-of-eight, which is quite close to a vertical straight line. The figure-of-eight is symmetrical as long as arms AB and EG are equal in length, if the stroke length is S, the straight section is longest when BE is around 2/3 S and AB is 1.5 S. It would have been possible to connect F directly to the piston rod, to avoid this, Watt added the parallelogram linkage BCDE to form a pantograph. The addition of the pantograph made the shorter and so the building containing the engine could be smaller. As already noted, the path of F is not a straight line.
Watts design produced a deviation of one part in 4000 from a straight line. Later, in the 19th century, perfect straight-line linkages were invented, sarrus linkage – an exact parallel motion in three dimensions General Linkages article in Encyclopædia Britannica,1958. Parallel Motion article in Encyclopædia Britannica,1911, robert Stuart, A Descriptive History of the Steam Engine, London, J. Knight and H. Lacey,1824. Contains a chapter about James Watts parallel motion mechanism
7.
Reciprocating engine
A reciprocating engine, often known as a piston engine, is typically a heat engine that uses one or more reciprocating pistons to convert pressure into a rotating motion. This article describes the features of all types. The main types are, the combustion engine, used extensively in motor vehicles, the steam engine, the mainstay of the Industrial Revolution. There may be one or more pistons, the hot gases expand, pushing the piston to the bottom of the cylinder. This position is known as the Bottom Dead Center, or where the piston forms the largest volume in the cylinder. The piston is returned to the top by a flywheel. This is where the forms the smallest volume in the cylinder. In most types the expanded or exhausted gases are removed from the cylinder by this stroke, the exception is the Stirling engine, which repeatedly heats and cools the same sealed quantity of gas. The stroke is simply the distance between the TDC and the BDC, or the greatest distance that the piston can travel in one direction, in some designs the piston may be powered in both directions in the cylinder, in which case it is said to be double-acting.
In most types, the movement of the piston is converted to a rotating movement via a connecting rod. A flywheel is used to ensure smooth rotation or to store energy to carry the engine through an un-powered part of the cycle. The more cylinders an engine has, the more vibration-free it can operate. The power of an engine is proportional to the volume of the combined pistons displacement. A seal must be made between the piston and the walls of the cylinder so that the high pressure gas above the piston does not leak past it. This seal is provided by one or more piston rings. These are rings made of a metal, and are sprung into a circular groove in the piston head. The rings fit tightly in the groove and press against the wall to form a seal. Cylinder capacities may range from 10 cm³ or less in model engines up to several thousand cubic centimetres in ships engines, the compression ratio affects the performance in most types of reciprocating engine
8.
Supercars Championship
The Supercars Championship is a touring car racing category based in Australia and run as an International Series under Fédération Internationale de lAutomobile regulations. Supercars events take place in all Australian states and the Northern Territory, an international round is held in New Zealand, while events have previously been held in China, the United Arab Emirates and the United States. A non-championship event is held in support of the Australian Grand Prix. The series is broadcast in 137 countries and has an average event attendance of over 100,000, the vehicles used in the series are loosely based on road-going, four-door saloon cars. Cars are custom made using a chassis, with only certain body panels being common between the road cars and race cars. To ensure parity between each make of car, many components are utilised. All cars must use a 5. 0-litre, naturally aspirated V8 engine, originally only for Ford Falcons and Holden Commodores, the New Generation V8 Supercar regulations, introduced in 2013, opened up the series to more manufacturers.
Nissan were the first new manufacturer to commit to the series with four Nissan Altimas, Volvo entered the series in 2014 with Garry Rogers Motorsport racing the Volvo S60. The concept of a formula centred around V8-engined Fords and Holdens for the Australian Touring Car Championship had been established as early as mid-1991, however, CAMS was waiting to see what the FIA did with its proposed international formula for 2.5 and 2. 0-litre touring cars. The new rules for the ATCC were announced in November 1991, during 1992, CAMS looked at closing the performance gap between the classes, only to have protests from Ford and Holden, who didnt want to see their cars beaten by the smaller cars. In June 1992, the structure was confirmed, Class A, Australian-produced 5. 0-litre V8-engined Fords. Class B,2. 0-litre cars complying with FIA Class II Touring Car regulations, Class C, normally aspirated two-wheel drive cars complying with 1992 CAMS Group 3A Touring Car regulations. This class would only be eligible in 1993, both the Ford EB Falcon and Holden VP Commodore ran American-based engines which were restricted to 7,500 rpm and a compression ratio of 10,1.
The V8s were first eligible to compete in the races of 1992. Cars from all three classes would contest the 1993 Australian Touring Car Championship as well as non-championship Australian touring car events such as the Bathurst 1000, for the purposes of race classification and points allocation, cars competed in two classes, Over 2, 000cc. Originally the 2. 0-litre class cars competed in a race to the V8s. This was changed for the round of 1993, after there were only nine entrants in the 2. 0-litre class for the first round at Amaroo Park. After round five at Winton, Holden was granted a new front, the BMWs were allowed a new splitter and a full DTM-specification rear wing
9.
Beam engine
A beam engine is a type of steam engine where a pivoted overhead beam is used to apply the force from a vertical piston to a vertical connecting rod. This configuration, with the engine driving a pump, was first used by Thomas Newcomen around 1705 to remove water from mines in Cornwall. Beam engines were first used to pump out of mines or into canals. The rotative beam engine is a design of beam engine where the connecting rod drives a flywheel. These beam engines could be used to power the line-shafting in a mill. They could be used to steam ships. The first beam engines were water-powered, and used to water from mines. A preserved example may be seen at Wanlockhead in Scotland, the first steam-related beam engine was developed by Thomas Newcomen. This was not, strictly speaking, steam powered, as the steam introduced below the piston was condensed to create a partial vacuum thus allowing atmospheric pressure to push down the piston and it was therefore called an Atmospheric Engine. The Newcomen atmospheric engine was adopted by many mines in Cornwall and elsewhere, technically this was still an atmospheric engine until he enclosed the upper part of the cylinder, introducing steam to push the piston down.
This made it a steam engine and arguably confirms him as the inventor of the steam engine. He patented the centrifugal governor and the parallel motion, the latter allowed the replacement of chains round an arch head and thus allowed its use as a rotative engine. His patents remained in place until the start of the 19th Century, however, in reality development had been ongoing by others and at the end of the patent period there was an explosion of new ideas and improvements. Watts beam engines were used commercially in much larger numbers and many continued to run for 100 years or more, Watt held patents on key aspects of his engines design, but his rotative engine was equally restricted by the patent by an other of the simple crank. The beam engine went on to be improved and enlarged in the tin- and copper-rich areas of south west England. Consequently, the Cornish beam engines became world-famous, as they remain among the most massive beam engines ever constructed, in a rotative beam engine, the piston is mounted vertically, and the piston rod drives the beam as before. A connecting rod from the end of the beam, rather than driving a pump rod.
Early Watt engines used Watts patent sun and planet gear, rather than a simple crank, once the patent had expired, the simple crank was employed universally
10.
James Watt
While working as an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow, Watt became interested in the technology of steam engines. He realised that contemporary engine designs wasted a great deal of energy by repeatedly cooling and reheating the cylinder, Watt introduced a design enhancement, the separate condenser, which avoided this waste of energy and radically improved the power and cost-effectiveness of steam engines. Eventually he adapted his engine to produce rotary motion, greatly broadening its use beyond pumping water, Watt attempted to commercialise his invention, but experienced great financial difficulties until he entered a partnership with Matthew Boulton in 1775. The new firm of Boulton and Watt was eventually highly successful, in his retirement, Watt continued to develop new inventions though none was as significant as his steam engine work. He developed the concept of horsepower, and the SI unit of power, James Watt was born on 19 January 1736 in Greenock, Renfrewshire, a seaport on the Firth of Clyde.
His father was a shipwright, ship owner and contractor, and served as the towns chief baillie, while his mother, Agnes Muirhead, both were Presbyterians and strong Covenanters. Watts grandfather, Thomas Watt, was a teacher and baillie to the Baron of Cartsburn. Despite being raised by parents, he on became a deist. Watt did not attend regularly, initially he was mostly schooled at home by his mother but he attended Greenock Grammar School. He exhibited great manual dexterity, engineering skills and an aptitude for mathematics, while Latin, when he was eighteen, his mother died and his fathers health began to fail. Watt travelled to London to study instrument-making for a year, returned to Scotland and he made and repaired brass reflecting quadrants, parallel rulers, parts for telescopes, and barometers, among other things. Because he had not served at least seven years as an apprentice, Watt was saved from this impasse by the arrival from Jamaica of astronomical instruments bequeathed by Alexander Macfarlane to the University of Glasgow, instruments that required expert attention.
Watt restored them to working order and was remunerated and these instruments were eventually installed in the Macfarlane Observatory. Subsequently three professors offered him the opportunity to set up a workshop within the university. It was initiated in 1757 and two of the professors, the physicist and chemist Joseph Black as well as the famed Adam Smith, at first he worked on maintaining and repairing scientific instruments used in the university, helping with demonstrations, and expanding the production of quadrants. In 1759 he formed a partnership with John Craig, an architect and businessman, to manufacture and sell a line of products including musical instruments and this partnership lasted for the next six years, and employed up to sixteen workers. One employee, Alex Gardner, eventually took over the business, in 1764, Watt married his cousin Margaret Miller, with whom he had five children, two of whom lived to adulthood, James Jr. and Margaret. His wife died in childbirth in 1772, in 1777 he was married again, to Ann MacGregor, daughter of a Glasgow dye-maker, with whom he had two children, who became a geologist and mineralogist, and Janet
