BÁNKI, Donát

As the son of a small village doctor he attended non-classical secondary school in Budapest and then enrolled at the Faculty of mechanical engineering at the Budapest University. Study was completed in 1881 and the following year he was employed as a designer at the factory → Ganz & Co. Here he made a number of important discoveries and improvements due to which he was appointed professor in 1899 at the III. Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University of Budapest. His fields of activities in the Department included the development of aquatic machinery and steam turbines.
At the →Ganz & Co factory B. worked closely with the head of the training workshop at the Technical University János →Csonka. Many joint patents resulted from this cooperation.
One of the outstanding results of this fruitful cooperation is Bánki-Csonka four stroke engine which was put into series production by the →Ganz factory. His ignition tube provided the best ignition for Otto engines until the invention of sparking plugs.
The patent application from 11th February 1893 (innovations in the petroleum engine) also contains a dispenser, which was named carburetor. In the training workshops of the Technical University they also produced their gas hammer, which was to be used in blacksmith's workshops. In 1898 B. patented his own high-compression engine in which water, injected directly into cylinder, cools the explosive mixture and thus raises the performance of the engine at the maximum limit.
At the University he was focused primarily on the question of mechanics of liquids, and after a thorough theoretical discretion came up to some, in practice very important patents. Among them the water turbine built in 1917 stands out. It was a solution to exploitation of hydropower in water courses with medium or low drop and it represented a substitution for the previously used primitive and inefficient water wheels. The Pelton turbine with double flow did not experience official validation and recognition from the Academy of Sciences before 1926, when B. passed away. The invention opened new directions for the development of small hydroelectric power plants. The improvement of the effectiveness of hydroelectric power plants was continuously employing B. and in 1918 he produced a comprehensive plan of exploitation of hydropower in the Danube near Djerdap.
In his theoretical studies, B. was primarily devoted to the problems of hydraulics and mechanics of liquids and gases, primarily of the non-laminar flows. In 1912 B. was elected corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.