Herbert Akroyd-Stuart
AKROYD STUART, Herbert MIMechE (1864-1927)
Born in England in Yorkshire, Herbert received his early training in his father’s Bletchley Iron and Tin Plate Works in which most of the activities were experimental. After being a junior Assistant in the Mechanical Engineering Department of the City and Guilds Technical College in London, he returned to Bletchley to develop the Akroyd Oil Engine.
His first patent No 7146 of May 1890 embodied the principle of automatic ignition with timed injection of fuel oil, but the engines were not entirely successful, due to pre ignition troubles and continuous dribbling through the injector valve during the working stroke. His second patent No 158994 of October 1890 involved the intake air being drawn through the walls of the cylinder and the oil being injected into the walls of a narrow necked combustion chamber at the head of this cylinder. In June 1891, Hornsby & Sons of Grantham acquired the sole rights to manufacture and develop engines to this specification, and then developed a range of single cylinder types with ratings between 1.5 and 16 HP. A water jacketed vaporiser, fitted in 1896, enabled the use of higher compression ratios and about a 25% increase in power. When their patent expired in 1904, oil engines working on this principle proliferated and with steadily increasing compression ratios.
Akroyd Stuart visited Western Australia in 1898, and settled in Claremont in 1900, where he developed an engine to work at 250psi. In 1905, he established his own company, H. Akroyd Stuart & Company in Fremantle, which he advertised as “Engineers for heating and lighting by liquid fuel for firing locomotives, boilers, and oil engines, agents for the Hornsby Akroyd Oil Engine and importers of solid drawn seamless steel lamp posts for municipal lighting, also Civil and Consulting Engineers, and agents for the new system of brewing with cold water”.
References:
WAPD 1902. Lutz, G., The contribution of Akroyd Stuart to the design and development of the heavy oil engine, Akroyd Stuart Lecture, The University of Western Australia, Sept 1977.
‘Weekend Magazine’, The West Australian 18 June 1983, p. 109.
Wikipedia entry for Herbert Ackroyd Stuart
