Carbon Disulphide Engines.

Updated: 31 July 2005
A rather exotic working fluid.

This is a very obscure corner of technology indeed, and I can only offer a few crumbs of information at present. If anyone knows more, I would be most gratified to hear from them.
The boiling point of carbon disulphide is only 46.3°C at atmospheric pressure, so it can be made to boil by heat rejected from other processes,

Left: From Knight's American Mechanical Dictionary, 1881 Edition.
"With very little loss", eh? I hope so, because carbon disulphide is poisonous. See below.
Carbon disulphide and bisulphide of carbon are of course two names for the same stuff.
This is an example of using a volatile liquid in a "bottoming cycle", which is not an indelicate mode of transport, but a way of getting more work out of the same amount of heat. Ammonia has been used for this purpose.
I have so far found no case in which carbon disulphide is used directly in a single cycle.

There are lots of reasons why using carbon disulphide as a working fluid is not a good idea. As soon as you depart from water or air, you find yourself dealing with something that is expensive, explosive, poisonous, or all three. So what about carbon disulphide?
I don't have any figures to hand for the cost of carbon disulphide, but it is clearly going to cost a lot more than water.
Carbon disulphide evaporates at room temperature, and the vapour is more than twice as heavy as air. Carbon disulphide easily forms explosive mixtures with air and ignites very easily; it is dangerous when exposed to heat, flame, sparks, or friction. Vapors can be ignited by contact with an ordinary light bulb.
Acute carbon disulphide poisoning is very dangerous. Absorption can occur through the skin, by ingestion or by inhalation. In severe poisoning, the subject quickly becomes comatose and death occurs in a few hours, usually due to respiratory depression and convulsions. In less severe cases local irritation, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain are followed by headache, euphoria, hallucinations, panic delirium, paranoid reactions and suicidal tendencies. In other words, your typical engineering development project...
Not for the first time, it occurs to me that water is a really good choice as a working fluid.