热力发动机技术发展的时间线

（Timeline of Heat Engine Technology）

热力发动机作为一类动力机械，长期以来一直为人们所熟知。自17世纪以来，热力发动机的效率已得到了显著提升，用途也日益广泛。热力发动机是一类可将热量转换为机械能的系统。时至今日，与热力发动机有关的技术和产业仍在持续发展中。

十六世纪及以前

Prehistory - The fire piston used by tribes in southeast Asia and the Pacific islands to kindle fire.

c. 450 BC - Archytas of Tarentum used a jet of steam to propel a toy wooden bird suspended on wire.

c. 200 BC - Hero of Alexandria's Engine, also known as Aeolipile. Demonstrates rotary motion produced by the reaction from jets of steam.

c. 10th century - China develops the earliest fire lances which were spear-like weapons combining a bamboo tube containing gunpowder and shrapnel like projectiles tied to a spear.

c 12th century - China, the earliest depiction of a gun showing a metal body and a tight-fitting projectile which maximises the conversion of the hot gases to forward motion.

1120 - Gerbert, a professor in the schools at Rheims designed and built an organ blown by air escaping from a vessel in which it was compressed by heated water.

1232 - First recorded use of a rocket. In a battle between the Chinese and the Mongols. ( see Timeline of rocket and missile technology for a view of rocket development through time.)

c. 1500 - Leonardo da Vinci builds the Architonnerre, a steam-powered cannon.

1551 - Taqi al-Din demonstrates a steam turbine, used to rotate a spit.

十七世纪

1629 - Giovanni Branca demonstrates a steam turbine.

1662 - Robert Boyle publishes Boyle's Law which defines the relationship between volume and pressure in a gas.

1665 - Edward Somerset, the Second Marquess of Worcester builds a working steam fountain.

1680 - Christiaan Huygens publishes a design for a piston engine powered by gunpowder but it is never built.

1690 - Denis Papin - produces design for the first piston steam engine.

1698 - Thomas Savery builds a pistonless steam-powered water pump for pumping water out of mines.

十八世纪

1707 - Denis Papin - produces design for his second piston steam engine in conjunction with Gottfried Leibniz.

1712 - Thomas Newcomen builds a piston-and-cylinder steam-powered water pump for pumping water out of mines

1748 - William Cullen demonstrates the first artificial refrigeration at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

1759 - John Harrison uses a bimetallic strip in his third marine chronometer (H3) to compensate for temperature-induced changes in the balance spring.

1769 - James Watt patents his first improved steam engine, see Watt steam engine

1787 - Jacques Charles formulates Charles's law which describes the relationship between as gas's volume and temperature. He does not publish this however and it is not recognised until Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac develops and references it in 1802.

1791 - John Barber patents the idea of a gas turbine.

1799 - Richard Trevithick builds the first high pressure steam engine.

十九世纪

1802 - Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac develops Gay-Lussac's law which describes the relationship between a gas's pressure and temperature.

1807 - Nicéphore Niépce installed his 'moss, coal-dust and resin' fuelled Pyréolophore internal combustion engine in a boat and powered up the river Saone in France.

1807 - Franco/Swiss engineer François Isaac de Rivaz built the De Rivaz engine, powered by the internal combustion of hydrogen and oxygen mixture and used it to power a wheeled vehicle.

1816 - Robert Stirling invented Stirling engine, a type of hot air engine.

1824 - Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot developed the Carnot cycle and the associated hypothetical Carnot heat engine that is the basic theoretical model for all heat engines. This gives the first early insight into the second law of thermodynamics.

1834 - Jacob Perkins, obtained the first patent for a vapor-compression refrigeration system.

1850s - Rudolf Clausius sets out the concept of the thermodynamic system and positioned entropy as being that in any irreversible process a small amount of heat energy is incrementally dissipated across the system boundary

1859 - Etienne Lenoir developed the first commercially successful internal combustion engine, a single-cylinder, two-stroke engine with electric ignition of illumination gas (not gasoline).

1861 - Alphonse Beau de Rochas of France originates the concept of the four-stroke internal-combustion engine by emphasizing the previously unappreciated importance of compressing the fuel–air mixture before ignition.

1861 - Nikolaus Otto patents a two-stroke internal combustion engine building on Lenoir's.

1872 - Pulsometer steam pump, a pistonless pump, patented by Charles Henry Hall. It was inspired by the Savery steam pump.

1873 - The British chemist Sir William Crookes invents the light mill a device which turns the radiant heat of light directly into rotary motion.

1877 - Theorist Ludwig Boltzmann visualized a probabilistic way to measure the entropy of an ensemble of ideal gas particles, in which he defined entropy to be proportional to the logarithm of the number of microstates such a gas could occupy.

1877 - Nikolaus Otto patents a practical four-stroke internal combustion engine (U.S. Patent 194,047)

1883 - Samuel Griffin of Bath UK patents a six-stroke internal combustion engine.

1884 - Charles A. Parsons builds the first modern Steam turbine.

1886 - Herbert Akroyd Stuart builds the prototype Hot bulb engine, an oil fueled Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition engine similar to the later diesel but with a lower compression ratio and running on a fuel air mixture.

1892 - Rudolf Diesel patents the Diesel engine (U.S. Patent 608,845) where a high compression ratio generates hot gas which then ignites an injected fuel.

二十世纪

1909, the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes develops the concept of enthalpy for the measure of the "useful" work that can be obtained from a closed thermodynamic system at a constant pressure.

1913 - Nikola Tesla patents the Tesla turbine based on the Boundary layer effect.

1926 - Robert Goddard of the USA launches the first liquid fuel rocket.

1929 - Felix Wankel patents the Wankel rotary engine (U.S. Patent 2,988,008)

1933 - French physicist Georges J. Ranque invents the Vortex tube, a fluid flow device without moving parts, that can separate a compressed gas into hot and cold streams.

1937 - Hans von Ohain builds a gas turbine

1940 - Hungarian Bela Karlovitz working for the Westinghouse company in the USA files the first patent for a magnetohydrodynamic generator, which can generate electricity directly from a hot moving gas

1942 - R.S. Gaugler of General Motors patents the idea of the Heat pipe, a heat transfer mechanism that combines the principles of both thermal conductivity and phase transition to efficiently manage the transfer of heat between two solid interfaces.

1950s - The Philips company develop the Stirling-cycle Stirling Cryocooler which converts mechanical energy to a temperature difference.

1962 - William J. Buehler and Frederick Wang discover the Nickel titanium alloy known as Nitinol which has a shape memory dependent on its temperature.

1992 - The first practical magnetohydrodynamic generators are built in Serbia and the USA.

二十一世纪以来

2011 - Shoichi Toyabe and others demonstrate a working Szilard engine using a phase-contrast microscope equipped with a high speed camera connected to a computer.

2011 - Michigan State University builds the first wave disk engine. An internal combustion engine which does away with pistons, crankshafts and valves, and replaces them with a disc-shaped shock wave generator.

2019 - A working quantum heat engine based on a spin-1/2 system and nuclear magnetic resonance techniques is demonstrated by Roberto Serra and others at the Universities of Waterloo, and the Universidade Federal do ABC and Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas.

2020 - A nano scale device that can act either as a heat engine or as a refrigerator by utilising quantum effects, is demonstrated by engineers at RIKEN Advanced Device Laboratory.

参考文献

[1] Timeline of heat engine technology - Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core

[2] Engineering:Timeline of heat engine technology - HandWiki

[3] Timeline of heat engine technology | Tractor & Construction Plant Wiki | Fandom