William John Macquorn Rankine

William John Macquorn Rankine (Edinburgh, Scotland, July 5, 1820-Glasgow, Scotland, December 24, 1872) was a Scottish engineer and physicist. Along with Rudolf Clausius, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), he was one of the pioneers of thermodynamics, focusing particularly on the first of the three laws of this branch of physics.

He developed a complete theory of the steam engine and, more generally, of all heat engines. His textbooks of engineering science and practice were used for many decades after their publication in the 1850s and 1860s. He published hundreds of articles and notes on science and engineering issues from the 1840s on, and his interests were remarkably varied, including, in his youth, botany, music theory, and number theory, and, in his maturity, most major branches of science, mathematics, and engineering. He was an enthusiastic amateur singer, pianist and cellist who composed his own humorous songs. He never got married.

Biography

His parents were David Rankine, a lieutenant in the British Army, and Barbara Grahame, from a prominent family of lawyers and bankers. Due to his failing health he was educated at his home, but later attended Ayr Academy (1828-9) and, for a very brief time, Glasgow High School (1830). Around 1830 the family moved to Edinburgh, where in 1834 he began studying at the Naval Academy under the mathematician George Lees. By then he was already very proficient in mathematics and received, as a gift from his uncle, Newton's Principia (1687), in the original Latin.

In 1836 he began to study a wide range of scientific subjects at the University of Edinburgh, including natural history under Robert Jameson, and natural philosophy under the physicist James David Forbes. Studying with Forbes, he was awarded prizes for essays on physical research methods and on the wave theory of light. During holidays he attended his father who, from 1830, was manager and then treasurer and engineer of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway, which brought coal to the growing city. He left Edinburgh University in 1838 without graduating (not unusual then) and went to Ireland to seek training as a civil engineer, where he became an apprentice to Sir John Benjamin MacNeill, a renowned civil engineer who was at the time inspector for the Irish Railway Commission, with whom he worked until 1842. During his apprenticeship he developed a technique, later known as Rankine's method, for laying out railway curves, taking full advantage of the theodolite and substantially improving accuracy and productivity on existing methods. In fact, at the same time the technique was being used by other engineers, and in the 1860s there was a minor controversy over Rankine's inventive priority.

Between 1844 and 1848 he worked for Locke & Errington on the construction of the Clydesdale Junction Railway, and subsequently on various works for the Caledonian Railway Company. In 1845/46 he designed a proposal for waterworks in Edinburgh and Leith which was rejected by the opposition of the Edinburgh Water Company. In 1849 he was elected a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and continued to carry out various works as a civil engineer. In 1852 he was elected a member of the Glasgow Philosophical Society, and on June 2 of the following year Fellow of the Royal Society of London. For his research in the field of thermodynamics, the Royal Society of Edinburgh awarded him the Keith Medal in 1854, and in November 1855 he was appointed Regius Professor of Civil Engineering and Mechanics at the University of Glasgow, a post he would hold until his death. From that chair he worked closely with Glasgow shipbuilders on substantial design improvements to ships and their engines. He introduced so-called “sandwich courses” that required students to work at local engineering firms during their vacations as a form of professional practice, and vigorously promoted the recognition of Engineering as a degree subject. As a result of these efforts, the university introduced a Certificate of Aptitude in Engineering Science in 1863, and in 1872 the degree of BSc (bachelor of science) for engineering was instituted.

In the aftermath of a notable storm in 1856, Rankine worked on the stability of chimneys to important practical conclusions. The following year Trinity College, Dublin awarded him an honorary doctorate and founded the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders of Scotland, being its first president; he also developed a theory of surface resistance in boats, based on experimental data provided by his friend J. R. Napier. In 1858 he published the first edition of his text on applied mechanics, Applied Mechanics , and in 1859 the Manual of the Steam Engine and other Prime Movers ; in July of that year, Rankine was instrumental in the formation of the 2nd Lanarkshire Volunteer Rifle Corps at the University of Glasgow, entering as a captain and becoming a major in 1860 commanding the 2nd Battalion of the 1st.er Lanarkshire Volunteer Rifle Regiment of that Corps, a position he held until 1864, when he resigned due to pressure of work related to ship architecture. In 1861 he finished his Manual of Civil Engineering , which he published in 1862, the year in which he was also a jury member for machinery at the World's Fair in London; the following year he was awarded a gold medal by the Scottish Institution of Engineers for a paper on the liquefaction of steam.

In 1864 he deepened his attention to the problems of naval engineering and fluid mechanics, investigating wave action and ship roll and lecturing at the Royal School of Naval Architecture. on strength of materials, again the following year on strength of fluids, and also in 1866 and 1867. From 1865 he began to contribute regularly to The Engineer magazine, and the following year saw the appearance of the book Shipbuilding - Theoretical and Practical of which he was editor and author of several chapters. In 1868 he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 1870 his book Machinery and Millwork was published, he was appointed to the board of inquiry into the sinking of HMS Captain, and in December of that year he was appointed a member of the Warships Committee. The following year he was elected vice president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 1872, together with Dr. Stevenson Macadam, he investigated and reported on the causes of explosions in grain mills. He died on December 24, 1872 at his home at 8 Albion Crescent, Dowanhill, Glasgow.

Thermodynamics

The year 1842 also marked Rankine's first attempt to reduce heat phenomena to a mathematical formula, but his purpose was frustrated by a lack of experimental data.

Undaunted, he returned to his youthful fascination with the mechanics of the heat engine. Although his theory of circulation of elastic vortex currents whose volumes spontaneously adapted to his surroundings might sound whimsical to scientists trained under a modern concept, in 1849 he managed to find the relationship between saturated vapor pressure and temperature. The following year he used his theory to establish relationships between the temperature, pressure, and density of gases, and expressions for the latent heat of evaporation of a liquid. He accurately predicted the surprising fact that the apparent specific heat of saturated steam would be negative.

Encouraged by his success, he set about calculating the efficiency of heat engines and used his theory as a basis for deducing the principle that the maximum efficiency of a heat engine is only a function of the two temperatures between which it operates. Although Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, had already derived a similar result, Rankine claimed that his result rested solely on his molecular vortex hypothesis, rather than Carnot's theory or any other hypothesis. The work marked the first step on Rankine's path to developing a more complete theory of heat.

Later, Rankine restructured the results of his molecular theories in terms of a macroscopic account of energy and its transformations. He defined and established distinctions between the real energy that is lost in dynamic processes and the potential energy that replaces it. He assumed the sum of the two energies to be constant, an idea that although recent was already familiar in the law of conservation of energy. From 1854 he made extensive use of his thermodynamic function, later realizing that it was identical to the Clausius entropy. By 1855 Rankine had formulated a "science of energetics" that explained dynamics in terms of energy and its transformations rather than force and motion. The theory was highly influential in the 1890s and significantly influenced the French physicist Pierre Duhem, who in his Traité de l'énergétique (1911) considered thermodynamics, not classical mechanics, as as the most fundamental theory. In 1859 he proposed the Rankine temperature scale, an absolute or thermodynamic scale, whose degree is equal to one degree Fahrenheit.

His energy theory offered Rankine an alternative, and rather more conventional, approach to his science; consequently, from the mid-1850s he made considerably less use of his molecular vortices. However, he claimed that James Clerk Maxwell's work on electromagnetism was indeed an extension of his model. In 1864, he argued that the microscopic theories of heat proposed by Clausius and Maxwell on the basis of atomic linear motion were inadequate; only after 1869 did Rankine admit the success of these rival theories. By that time, his own atomic model had become nearly identical to Thomson's.

As a constant goal, especially as a professor of engineering, he used his own theories to develop a set of practical results and deduce the underlying physical principles, including:

• Rankine-Hugoniot's equation on the spread of shock waves, which governs the behavior of normal shock waves to incoming flow. She has been appointed in honor of Rankine and the French engineer Pierre Henri Hugoniot.
• The Rankine cycle, an analysis of an ideal steam engine with capacitor. As in other thermodynamic cycles, the maximum efficiency of the Rankine cycle is given by calculating the maximum efficiency of the Carnot cycle.
• Properties of gases and steam.

Material fatigue

Drawing from a fatigue failure in a shaft, 1843.

Rankine was one of the first engineers to recognize that fatigue failures in railroad stock axles were caused by the initiation and expansion of brittle cracks. In the early 1840s he examined many broken axles, especially after the Versailles railway disaster of 1842, when a locomotive axle suddenly fractured, causing an accident that killed more than fifty passengers. He showed that the shafts had failed by the progressive growth of a brittle crack from a shoulder, or other source of stress concentration in the part. His conclusions were supported by similar direct analyzes of failed shafts by Joseph Glynn, which showed that failure it had been produced by the slow growth of a brittle crack in a process now known as “metal fatigue”. It is highly probable that the front axle of one of the locomotives involved in the Versailles catastrophe failed in a similar way.

Rankine presented his findings in a paper submitted to the Institution of Civil Engineers. However, his work was ignored by many engineers who persisted in believing that stress could cause "recrystallization" of metal, a myth that has survived even to recent times. The recrystallization theory was wrong, but it prevented useful research until the work of William Fairbairn demonstrated, a few years later, the weakening effect of repeated bending of long beams.

Naval engineering and architecture and hydrodynamics

Rankine worked closely with the Clyde shipbuilders, particularly his friend and collaborator James Robert Napier, to improve ship design and add precision and theoretical input to a field that until then was largely empirical. He was the editor and main author of the treatise Shipbuilding-Theoretical and Practical, and made a notable contribution to the theory of ship design and movement. Beginning in 1862 with a proper derivation of the trochoidal shape of waves in deep water, he examined the rotational motions of ships in waves. His two-dimensional analysis of the flow of water around circular and oval bodies enabled him to determine the lines of a vessel that would cause the least friction when moving at sea; he also calculated the efficiency of propellers. He devoted a number of articles to exposing shapes elementary ways of solving hydrodynamics problems, and devised a simple method for obtaining graphical representations of water lines to prove propositions in hydrodynamics.

Other work

Rankine worked in many other fields of Physics and Engineering. In the fields of physical theory, in addition to those already mentioned, he worked on atomic theory, elasticity, fluid dynamics, and rotodynamics. Regarding his engineering contributions, he dabbled in the areas of masonry construction, properties of cast iron columns, a method of drawing railway curves, soil mechanics, and drinking water supply.

Posts

Science and technical books

• (1858). A Manual of Applied Mechanics. London-Glasgow; 21st ed. 1921, French translation of 7th ed. by A. Vialay, Manuel de mécanique appliquée (Paris, 1876)
• (1859). A Manual of the Steam Engine and Other Prime Movers. London-Glasgow; 17th ed. 1908, French translation of 8th ed. by G. Richard, Manuel de la machine à vapeur et des autres moteurs (Paris, 1878)
• (1862). A Manual of Civil Engineering. London; 24th ed. 1911, German translation of the 12th ed. by F. Kreuter, Handbuch der Bauingenieurkunst (Vienna, 1880)
• (1866). Useful Rules and Tables Relating to Mensuration, Engineering, Structures, and Machines. London; 7a ed. 1889
• (1869). A Manual of Machinery and Millwork (1869). London; 7a ed. 1893
• In collaboration with E. F. Bamber, (1873). A Mechanical Text-Book; or, Introduction to the Study of Mechanics and Engineering. London; 3rd ed. 1884;
• Editor and lead author, in collaboration with Isaac Watts, F. K. Barnes and J. R. Napier (1866). Shipbuilding, Theoretical and Practical. London
• Articles on thermodynamics and heat in J. P. Nichol, ed. (1857). Cyclopaedia of the Physical Sciences. London-Glasgow
• His inaugural conference regius professor, “De Concordia inter Scientiarum Machinalium Contemplationem et Usum”, was published as Introductory Lecture on the Harmony of Theory and Practice in Mechanics (London-Glasgow, 1856), later reproduced in A Manual of Applied Mechanics

Non-technical books

• (1871). A Memoir of John Elder, Engineer and Shipbuilder. Edinburgh; 2nd ed. Glasgow, 1883
• (1874). Songs and Fableswith M. Blackburn illustrations. Glasgow-London.

Articles

Rankine published more than 150 articles in various scientific journals, including Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Trans. R. Soc. Edin.), Proceedings of the Royal Philosphical Society of Glasgow, The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science (Philos. Mag.), The Engineer, Naval Architecture Transactions, etc. Most of his major papers on thermodynamics, light, elasticity of solids, energetics, and hydrodynamics are included in

• Rankine, William John MacQuorn (1881). W. J. Millar, ed. Miscellaneous Scientific Papers; by W. J. M. Rankine. From the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal and Other Scientific and Philosophical Societies, and the Scientific Journals. With a Memoir of the Author by P. G. Tait (in English). London: Charles Griffin and Company..

Acknowledgments

• Member of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts
• Associate Member Institution of Civil Engineers1843 (he was never a full member and resigned in 1857)
• Member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1850
• Member of the Royal Society London, 1853.
• Keith Medal Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1854
• Founder and first president of the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland, 1857.
• Doctor of Laws (LL. D.) honoris causa Trinity College (Dublin)
• Foreign Member Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien (Real Swedish Academy of Sciences), 1868.
• The Rankine Thermometric Scale is named in his honor
• The moon crater Rankine bears this name in his memory.
• Included in the Hall of Fame of Scottish Engineering, 2013.
• Rankine Conferences British Geotechnical Association They're so-called in their honor since 1961.