William Rankine

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William John MacQuorn Rankine
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William John Macquorn Rankine
FRSE FRS
William John Macquorn Rankine
Born(1820-07-05)5 July 1820
Edinburgh, Scotland
Died24 December 1872(1872-12-24) (aged 52)
Glasgow, Scotland
NationalityScottish
Alma materUniversity of Edinburgh
Known for
AwardsKeith Medal (1854)
Scientific career
FieldsPhysics, engineering, civil engineering
InstitutionsUniversity of Glasgow

William John Macquorn Rankine

Kelvin scale
of temperature.

Rankine developed a complete theory of the steam engine and indeed of all heat engines. His manuals of engineering science and practice were used for many decades after their publication in the 1850s and 1860s. He published several hundred papers and notes on science and engineering topics, from 1840 onwards, and his interests were extremely varied, including, in his youth, botany, music theory and number theory, and, in his mature years, most major branches of science, mathematics and engineering.

He was an enthusiastic amateur singer, pianist and cellist who composed his own humorous songs.[citation needed]

Life

Rankine was born in Edinburgh to Lt David Rankin (sic), a civil engineer from a military background, who later worked on the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway (locally known as the Innocent Railway).[1][2] His mother was Barbara Grahame, of a prominent legal and banking family.

His father moved around Scotland on various projects and the family moved with him. William was initially educated at home but he later attended Ayr Academy (1828–29) and then the High School of Glasgow (1830). Around 1830 the family moved to Edinburgh when the father got a post as Manager of the Edinburgh to Dalkeith Railway. The family then lived at 2 Arniston Place.[3]

In 1834 he was sent to the Scottish Naval and Military Academy on Lothian Road in Edinburgh[4] with the mathematician George Lee. By that year William was already highly proficient in mathematics and received, as a gift from his uncle, Isaac Newton's Principia (1687) in the original Latin.

In 1836, Rankine began to study a spectrum of scientific topics at the

Irish Railway Commission. During his pupilage he developed a technique, later known as Rankine's method, for laying out railway curves, fully exploiting the theodolite and making a substantial improvement in accuracy
and productivity over existing methods. In fact, the technique was simultaneously in use by other engineers – and in the 1860s there was a minor dispute about Rankine's priority.

The year 1842 also marked Rankine's first attempt to reduce the phenomena of heat to a mathematical form but he was frustrated by his lack of experimental data. At the time of Queen Victoria's visit to Scotland, later that year, he organised a large bonfire situated on Arthur's Seat, constructed with radiating air passages under the fuel. The bonfire served as a beacon to initiate a chain of other bonfires across Scotland.

In 1850 he was elected a Fellow of the

Keith Prize for the period 1851–53. He served as the Society's Vice President from 1871 to 1872.[2]

From 1855 he was Professor of Civil Engineering and Mechanics at

Glasgow University.[2]

He died at 8 Albion Crescent (now called Dowanside Road), Dowanhill, Glasgow at 11:45pm on Christmas Eve, 24 December 1872, aged only 52.[5] He was unmarried and had no children. His death was registered by his uncle, Alex Grahame (his late mother's brother in law).

Thermodynamics

Undaunted,[

saturated steam would be negative.[6]

Emboldened by his success, in 1851 he set out to calculate the efficiency of heat engines and used his theory as a basis to deduce the principle, that the maximum efficiency possible for any heat engine is a function only of the two temperatures between which it operates. Though a similar result had already been derived by

William Thomson, Rankine claimed that his result rested upon his hypothesis of molecular vortices alone, rather than upon Carnot's theory or some other additional assumption. The work marked the first step on Rankine's journey to develop a more complete theory of heat. In 1853, he coined the term potential energy.[7]

Rankine later recast the results of his molecular theories in terms of a macroscopic account of

motion.[8] This article presents the first published definition of energy in terms of capacity for performing work,[9] which quickly became the standard general definition of energy.[10] The theory was very influential in the 1890s. In 1859 he proposed the Rankine scale of temperature, an absolute or thermodynamic scale whose degree is equal to a Fahrenheit degree. In 1862, Rankine expanded Lord Kelvin’s theory of universal heat death and, along with Kelvin himself, formulated the heat death paradox, which disproves the possibly of an infinitely old universe.[11]

Energetics offered Rankine an alternative, and rather more mainstream, approach, to his science and, from the mid-1850s, he made rather less use of his molecular vortices. Yet he still claimed that Maxwell's work on electromagnetics was effectively an extension of his model. And, in 1864, he contended that the microscopic theories of heat proposed by Clausius and James Clerk Maxwell, based on linear atomic motion, were inadequate. It was only in 1869 that Rankine admitted the success of these rival theories. By that time, his own model of the atom had become almost identical with that of Thomson.

As was his constant aim, especially as a teacher of engineering, he used his own theories to develop a number of practical results and to elucidate their physical principles including:

  • The
    Rankine–Hugoniot equation for propagation of shock waves, governs the behaviour of shock waves normal to the oncoming flow. It is named after physicists Rankine and the French engineer Pierre Henri Hugoniot
    ;
  • The Rankine cycle, an analysis of an ideal heat-engine with a condensor. Like other thermodynamic cycles, the maximum efficiency of the Rankine cycle is given by calculating the maximum efficiency of the Carnot cycle;
  • Properties of steam, gases and vapours.

The history of rotordynamics is replete with the interplay of theory and practice. Rankine first performed an analysis of a spinning shaft in 1869, but his model was not adequate and he predicted that supercritical speeds could not be attained.

Fatigue studies

Drawing of a fatigue failure in an axle, 1843

Rankine was one of the first engineers to recognise that

Versailles train crash failed in a similar way. Rankine presented his conclusions in a paper delivered to the Institution of Civil Engineers. His work was ignored however, by many engineers who persisted in believing that stress could cause "re-crystallisation" of the metal, a myth which has persisted even to recent times. The theory of recrystallisation was quite wrong, and inhibited worthwhile research until the work of William Fairbairn
a few years later, which showed the weakening effect of repeated flexure on large beams. Nevertheless, fatigue remained a serious and poorly understood phenomenon, and was the root cause of many accidents on the railways and elsewhere. It is still a serious problem, but at least is much better understood today, and so can be prevented by careful design.

Other work

Rankine in the 1870s

Rankine served as Regius Professor of Civil Engineering and Mechanics at the University of Glasgow from November 1855 until his death in December 1872, pursuing engineering research along a number of lines in civil and mechanical engineering.

Rankine was instrumental in the formation of the forerunner of

Glasgow University Officer Training Corps
, the 2nd Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteer Corps at Glasgow University in July 1859, becoming Major in 1860 after it was formed into the first company of the 2nd Battalion, 1st Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteer Corps; he served until 1864, when he resigned due to pressure of work – much of it associated with Naval Architecture.

Civil engineering

The Rankine Lectures, organised by the British Geotechnical Association, are named in recognition of the significant contributions Rankine made to:

Naval architecture

Rankine worked closely with Clyde shipbuilders, especially his friend and lifelong collaborator

Institution of Engineers & Shipbuilders in Scotland in 1857. He was an early member of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects (founded 1860) and attended many of its annual meetings. With William Thomson and others, Rankine was a member of the board of enquiry into the controversial sinking of HMS Captain
.

Awards and honours

Publications

Books
  • Manual of Applied Mechanics (1858)
  • Manual of the Steam Engine and Other Prime Movers (1859)
  • Manual of Civil Engineering (1861)
  • Shipbuilding, theoretical and practical (1866)
  • Manual of Machinery and Millwork (1869)
    • 1859 copy of A Manual of the Steam Engine and Other Prime Movers
      1859 copy of A Manual of the Steam Engine and Other Prime Movers
    • Title page to A Manual of the Steam Engine and Other Prime Movers (1859)
      Title page to A Manual of the Steam Engine and Other Prime Movers (1859)
    • Table of contents to A Manual of the Steam Engine and Other Prime Movers (1859)
      Table of contents to A Manual of the Steam Engine and Other Prime Movers (1859)
    • Introduction to A Manual of the Steam Engine and Other Prime Movers (1859)
      Introduction to A Manual of the Steam Engine and Other Prime Movers (1859)
    Papers
    About Rankine
    • Rankine, William John MacQuorn (1881). Miscellaneous Scientific Papers. London: Charles Griffin and Company.

    See also

    References

    1. ^ [email protected]. "Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame". www.engineeringhalloffame.org. Retrieved 9 April 2018.
    2. ^
      ISBN 0-902-198-84-X
      .
    3. ^ Edinburgh Post Office Directory 1831
    4. ^ Edinburgh Post Office Directory 1830
    5. ^ Deaths in the District of Partick, 1872, page 199, National Records of Scotland 646/3 597
    6. S2CID 100996660
      .
    7. S2CID 250895349
      .
    8. ^ Rankine, William John Macquorn (1855). "Outlines of the science of energetics". The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal. 2: 120–141.
    9. ^ Rankine, William John Macquorn (1855). "Outlines of the science of energetics". The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal. 2: 129.
    10. S2CID 250895349
      .
    11. ^ Thomson, William (1862). "On the Age of the Sun's Heat". Macmillan's Magazine. Vol. 5. pp. 388–393.
    12. ^ "Past Presidents of IESIS". iesis.org. 2012. Retrieved 6 May 2012.
    13. ^ "Library and Archive catalogue". The Royal Society. Retrieved 4 October 2010.[permanent dead link]
    14. ^ www.iesis.org. "Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame". www.engineeringhalloffame.org. Retrieved 9 April 2018.
    15. doi:10.1080/14786445308647205
      . Retrieved 17 March 2014.

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