Has there ever been an internal combustion engine using gun power in place of fuel?
“It seems so simple; has anyone ever tried this?” It has been tried many times, and with each advance in gunpowder technology, it’s tried again. Even though the U.S. Patent Office has issued patents for gunpowder engines, the essential step of “reduction to practice”, also know as “building one that works”, has been elusive. Mythbusters did a pretty good episode on the subject two years ago. See link #1. A large part of the difficulty is not technological, but that the concept is not economical. Gunpowder is expensive. Coal, however, is not, and one of the earliest engines built by Rudolph Diesel was run on coal dust in 1896 (see link #2). Considerable development was done in Germany and the U.S. over several decades, but was put aside due to a number of problems which were not present in the increasingly available and economical liquid petroleum fuels. The U.S. Department of Energy supported research on coal dust engines in the 1980’s when the price of fossil fuels spiked, but the res
