Henry Phineas Riall Sankey
Captain Matthew Henry Phineas Riall Sankey (born November 9, 1853 in Nenagh , Ireland , † October 3, 1925 ) was an Irish engineer. According to him, will Sankey diagrams to represent different flow volumes in systems named.
Career
Sankey was born on November 9, 1853 as the son of a general in Nenagh in the Irish county of Tipperary. He went to school in Morges and Schaffhausen (Switzerland). He then went to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich near Greenwich and finally to the School of Military Engineering at Chatham, Kent. He received his license as a Royal Engineer in 1873 and then served in England, Gibraltar and finally as an instructor at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Canada. In 1882 he was assigned to the surveying department in Southampton and got to know about galvanic cliché printing and the leading manufacturer of steam engines, Peter Willans. In 1889, at Willan's insistence, Sankey resigned from military service and from then on worked in a managerial role at Robinson & Willans. Sankey later worked as a consultant and was on the board of various companies. From 1920 to 1921 he was President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers . Sankey died on October 3, 1925.
Professional achievements
A central question in Sankey's work has always been the question of increasing the efficiency and thus improving the economy of steam engines. In the course of his research in 1898, Sankey discussed the thermal efficiency of steam engines by comparing the energy flows of a real steam engine with those of an ideal steam engine. For visualization, he selected a diagram in which the heat flows were shown as a current, the width of which indicates the amount of heat that is supplied to the factory or leaves it again per unit of time (see picture). This form of representation was never used again by Sankey, it was simply a waste product of the efficiency discussion. A decade later, however, similar diagrams were published internationally and called Sankey diagrams in honor of the inventor .
literature
- HR Sankey: The Thermal Efficiency of Steam Engines. In: MPICE 125, 1896, pp. 182-242.
- M. Schmidt: The use of Sankey diagrams in material flow management. In: Contributions from Pforzheim University. No. 124, 2006 ( Download PDF ).
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Sankey, Henry Phineas Riall |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Sankey, Matthew Henry Phineas Riall |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Irish engineer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 9, 1853 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Nenagh , Ireland |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 3, 1925 |