Matthew 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 Sankey diagrams are named to represent different flow volumes in systems.

Career

Sankey was born on November 9, 1853 as the son of a general in Menagh in the Irish County Tipperary. He went in Morges and Schaffhausen ( Switzerland ) to school. Then he came to the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich Greenwich and finally to the School of Military Engineering in Chatham in Kent. In 1873 he obtained his patent as royal engineer 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 National Survey in Southampton and learned about the galvanic block print and the leading manufacturer of steam engines, Peter Willans know. 1889 Sankey acknowledged at the urging Willans military service and began working as an executive with the firm Robinson & Willan. Later Sankey worked as a consultant and served on the boards of various companies. From 1920 to 1921 he was president of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. Sankey died on 3 October 1925.

Professional Achievements

A central issue in the work Sankeys was always the question of efficiency and thus economic improvement of steam engines. In the course of his research Sankey 1898 discussed the thermal efficiency of steam engines, by which he compared the energy flows of a real steam engine an ideal steam engine. For visualization, he chose a graph in which the heat flows were presented as current whose width indicates that amount of heat that is supplied per unit time of the factory or it leaves again ( see picture). This form of presentation was never used by Sankey, she was merely a waste product of the implemented efficiency discussion. However, a decade later, similar diagrams have been published internationally and called in honor of the inventor as Sankey diagrams.