Ægidius Elling

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Ægidius Elling
Improved gas turbine prototype based on the 1903 patent, installed in the Christiania Seildugsfabrikk in 1906

Jens William Ægidius Elling (born July 26, 1861 in Christiania , † May 27, 1949 in Oslo - spelling of the nickname also Aegid (i) us ) was a Norwegian engineer and inventor . He is best known as the developer of an early working prototype of a gas turbine .

Live and act

Aegidius Elling was born in Oslo in 1861 ( called Christiania at that time ). His brother Catharinus later became known as a musician.

Aegidius attended the technical school in Christiania from 1876 and graduated in 1881 as a mechanical engineer . Elling had already worked on the concept of a gas turbine at school, and in 1884, just three years after graduating, he applied for a patent for a first draft . Between 1885 and 1902 he worked in various machine shops in Sweden and Norway as a developer and designer for steam engines . During this time, however, he also pushed ahead with his ideas for a gas turbine and went on study trips to the leading industrial countries.

The major obstacle to gas turbine design at the time was the low efficiency of the compressor . Other developers who worked on it independently of Elling at the turn of the century also had to struggle with this: Auguste Rateau , René Armengoud and Charles Lemâle in France, Franz Stolze and Hans Holzwarth in Germany. In 1903 Elling finally succeeded in developing a turbo compressor with a remarkable efficiency of around 85 to 87%. In this way, the compressor consumed less energy than the turbine delivered, and the machine was able to deliver excess work for the first time. The multi-stage compressor had radial blades , adjustable guide vanes, several intermediate injections for cooling, ran at a speed of 17,000 to 20,000 revolutions per minute and offered a useful output of around 11 hp (8 kW). The machine is exhibited today in the Norwegian Museum of Technology (Norsk Teknisk Museum) in Oslo.

In the following years, Elling continued to improve his design and increased the number of stages and power of the machine, ultimately (1925) up to 75 hp. Elling also founded two of his own companies ( AS Elling Compressor and AS Rotation ) to convert his patents into marketable products . Since Elling was apparently not as skilled as an entrepreneur, especially in advertising and marketing, as he was in technical issues, his development received little national and international attention and brought little economic profit. Elling therefore continued to work as an employee for other companies parallel to his independent development activity. Disappointed by the low response from Norwegian industry and by the fact that other developers such as Adolf Meyer took the lead internationally, Elling finally gave up gas turbine development in the 1930s and turned to other thermal engineering machines, apparatus and processes, in particular were used in the Norwegian fishing and pulp industry and salt production from seawater.

In 1937 Elling received a silver medal from the Norwegian Polytechnic Society for his services to turbo engineering. He died in Oslo in 1949.

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d e Dag Johnson: Ægidius Elling . In: Norsk Biografisk Leksikon . Kunnskapsforlaget (Norwegian, full text of the entry on snl.no).
  2. H. Stoff: How the axial turbo compressor learned to run . In: In-Touch-Magazin . Journal of the graduate association of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Ruhr University Bochum. 2005, p. 14–17 ( full text on Ruhr-uni-bochum.de [PDF; 486 kB ]). Full text ( Memento of the original from March 13, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de
  3. Ægidius Elling and gas turbines. (No longer available online.) Norsk Teknisk Museum, formerly the original ; accessed on February 9, 2011 (with pictures).  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / tekniskmuseum.no

Web links

Commons : Ægidius Elling  - collection of images, videos and audio files