Funding

I see that most steam projects are not being funded. I have gotten 90% of this done. Its needing another $15,000. But have no idea how to get there. I know whats needed from experience. but its hopeless. I feel a sense of my help is going to bad health.

Who knows maybe Independent development is worthless.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/19/2019 03:08PM by Jeremy Holmes.

Hi Jeremy,

Maybe independent development is worthless. I think that now and then too. So do all independent developers. It's called
"critical thinking". But maybe it is not worthless, With the right idea?

Peter

Im wondering about possibly getting a grant. I have solicited for a grant before but they want like $3000 to get the thing going. What I do have is all the previous development. Im sure I can do it little by little without the grant. I dont know maybe I need a partner. The class of development is way out of the hobbyist class

The only grant I was involved in ended up being supported by the community college grant writer. We won based on my ideas and his skill as a grant writer. Have you looked into possible educational possibilities at colleges? If you can repurpose your project as an environmental project you might find a government grant that could help. The grant I was involved in got $2 million over 5 years. It guaranteed my salary for 5 years.

Lohring Miller

Hi Jeremy,
My friend, I feel your pain. There is a saying, pretty sure its from a poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, "If you build a better mouse trap, the world will beat a path to your door".

Also, keep in mind, everyone has ideas and opinions. I would like to be known for this saying, "Ideas are like as# #holes, everyone has one. It's the one who can demonstrate an idea or concept gets my attention. All others I will kindly disregard." Note that I cannot use certain words here, trying to disguise and pretty sure you know what words I use when stating it.

I'll tell you this, when you write or speak, I listen because you are trying to do something. I wish I could justify funding you. As you know, I'm walking my own talk.

Wishing you the very best my friend,
Rick

Hi Rick,

I appreciate your forward momentum I really want to demonstrate the 4 cycle flash steam engine. From what ive seen it will be marvel of engineering.

What i'm trying to demonstrate is no boiler and using the engine itself as a flash steam generating unit.

I have spent alot of time working to make a whole system that is safe. I will succeed and have much experience with the hit n miss engine.

Just keep in mind that I have a whole tech just for safety.

The injector can handle super-critical fluid, But I dont recommend it. over the years the injector can be controlled digitally. Variable lift and cutoff control/adv/ret. The injector has this type of capability and at least i have completed that phase of development.

Hi Jeremy,
This thread is a good talk point this weekend at the Mini-Meet. I'll have a beer for you and we can solve the problems of the world? Hope I'll see you there?

I have a talk prepared about a total steam engine concept that came to me while reading a book about Tesla. I bounced the idea off of Jamison and he thought it was quite creative. In other words, he thinks I'm a pretty fart smeller...that was a joke

You're invention might play a part in the reality of this idea. I have the presentation with Tim Nye, PHD in ME for review and accuracy. I used 2nd order curves to predict my concept and wanted his take on it.

Please let me know...

Kind regards,
Rick

Surely this has been pointed out before. But in case it hasn't:
boiler hp = heating surface (in sq. ft.) / factor
factor = 8 to 17, depending on design. Small tubes use the lower factors, big tubes the higher.
brake hp = 2 to 3 times boiler hp
So a 6x6 inch aircraft-engine-size cylinder will have a heating surface of 200 sq. in., which is 1.4 sq. ft., which (with a factor of 10) gives 0.14 boiler hp, which might produce 0.42 brake hp.
A steam car will require 10 real hp at least, so you need 23 Wright Cyclone cylinders if you're heating the steam through the cylinder walls. That is assuming that they can work at the temperature inside a fire-tube boiler.
Sounds a bit impractical to me.
Water injection into Diesel cylinders was tried in marine engines during the 1920's. The conclusion was it wasn't worth the complication.

You are correct Ed, the cylinder and cyl head does not have the surface area to flash water to steam.
Take a look at this page and you can see what im doing.[flashsteam.com]

Hi Ed,
I just want test understanding...given a small tube, fire tube boiler. One can get 1/8 BHP...OK. Then, you convert BHP to Brake HP. I tell you what, I'll use 2.5, half way between 2 to 3. Brake HP comes out as 5/16 Br HP. Not sure about this one? Can you explain?

Any values on a tube boiler?

Thanks,
Rick

I would question basing an estimated brake horsepower from boiler horsepower. Under this method, we could have two boilers, each rated at 50 HP, but one generates a lot of steam at 50 psi and 285 degrees while the other generates very little steam at 800 psi and 800 degrees. The first engine is very low pressure and right at the saturation line, you can hardly expand the steam and need almost full cutoff to make the engine run. The second engine could happily run at an 8 to 1 expansion ratio and still be exhausting mildly superheated steam. This is one of those schemes that work when comparing "apples to apples" but rapidly breaks down as a general rule. A more analytical method is needed to get any sort of realistic estimate of output under all conditions. This is why I posted the spreadsheet in another topic, the method I developed is identical to one employed by Art Gardiner in developing Chuk's LSR engine and it also gave pretty similar results to Tim Nye's calculations for another LSR design even though he employed polynomial coefficients of expansion to estimate power output. The polynomial method has been used for well over a century and has been detailed in countless texts on the subject.

Regards,

Ken

Quote
Ed Ferris
Water injection into Diesel cylinders was tried in marine engines during the 1920's. The conclusion was it wasn't worth the complication.

http://www.trucktrend.com/how-to/expert-advice/1105dp-water-injection-or-intercooler

Quote
Water injection as turbo intercooler
Reducing EGT with Water Injection
Injecting water into the air intake stream is one way of helping control EGT. If a truck is overfueled, water can help cool combustion and reduce EGT as it vaporizes and turns into steam. Water can also be injected between the turbo and the intercooler, as exit temperatures from the compressor can be as much as 500 degrees before the intercooler. Introducing cool water into the intake stream before the intercooler can lead to a greater temperature drop before the intercooler, and cooler intake air temperatures. On a truck that’s blowing black smoke while towing, the water can also be used to clean up the haze and save whatever is being towed from getting covered with soot. On an average overfueled truck that’s towing, look for a standard water injection kit to drop EGT by 100 to 200 degrees.

Yes, I would expect a 1/8-hp boiler to produce not more than 1/2 hp in an engine, providing the engine is not optimized for a constant speed and constant load.
The rules of thumb I used are from the agricultural-engine era, specifically the Gaar-Scott line made here in Richmond, Indiana.

.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/02/2019 07:50AM by Jeremy Holmes.

Hi Ed,

Don't get discouraged by any replies. I took me years how to best describe how I doing what im doing. Jim Crank contributed to my theory's and constants.

The best way to describe us is that we study engineering theory. In this way we explore the depths of our imagination

For me there is many components such as engine development, electronics instrumentation and external combustion.

Here is some of my work from years ago...

[www.youtube.com]

Well since the admins are being lenient

Do you feel like we do Full Version
[www.youtube.com]

Hey Jeremy,

If you can't "find" a way, then _make_ a way to do it.

Peter Frampton...

uh, Brow...

feeling the way you do...

"'Twas ever thus"...

The ultimate "get thru tough times" song for me.

Imagine a 1920s Art Deco SoCal Spanish stucco mansion, in the early 1980s, way way way late at night, with a dreamy kid listening to his musician brother's old 33LP vinyls on studio-grade headphones in a dark corner of the huge barrel-vaulted living room...

[www.youtube.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/04/2019 02:51AM by Peter Brow.

Hmm, 33 1/3 rpm LP vinyl phonograph records. In the 1980s they were "officially declared" to be an obsolete dead technology, gone forever, replaced by modern/new/superior CD's and Internet downloads, never to return. Fast forward to 2019, where vinyl record production has been increasing every year for the past decade, along with vinyl record player production. Even Mr. Pete has equipped his new Texas living room with a U-Turn Audio "Orbit Basic" turntable, plugged right into the same late-1960s Sansui high-end tuner/amp/speakers setup which his Dad bought in Saigon, Vietnam.

There is now a huge thriving subculture of vinyl-record fans, with tons of highly-profitable phonograph-record and record-player manufacturers catering to them.

Weird idea, eh? "Obsolete, dead, gone forever" technology turning into hot/trendy/profitable new products, decades after it was officially written off as "extinct tech, worthless, gone forever". Never happens, ever.

Zillions of other examples.

Could the next example be classic/traditional steam automobiles?

Food for thought.

Peter



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/04/2019 03:44AM by Peter Brow.

Hi Peter,

No vinyl-record fans, have stock piles of good stuff. Notice this video, the record is warped and is analog but has no "noise from the background

It actually shows the record on the turn table.

FRONT 242 - Don't Crash - 1985 Vinyl 12" Single
[www.youtube.com]

Jeremy, keep hanging in there. I know your problem well and you have gotten more actual work than my brother and I have ,discounting cad work. You, like a lot of the club members, have a good working knowledge of steam and the math behind it. Don't give up. When you least expect it perseverance will pay off.

SteveW

Just got to wandering if anyone is working on steam projects, custom vehicles or something. I've been working on the concept of heating greenhouses without outside input, something I've wanted for many years and done a lot of research and experimentation on, think I'm making some progress now. Ready to set something up and get something running. The steam stuff is kind of a sideline support thing. My steam truck project needs to have some finishing details. Like weight in the wheels to make it stable on slopes, a generator installed on the engine, etc. The old engine works ok but it would be better with a low profile engine of a different design. So I need to custom build one to suit. (a someday when I find time thing) and use the old vertical on a stationary application. But recently between an acquaintance in the local small town and our neighbor, (Joseph and Alvin) they are aquireing a new Mike Brown 3 HP engine. maybe 3.5 at 200 psi, my manual says 4 at 250. Joseph ordered it sometime back, but now life has gone different way and he doesn't want it, so he's donating it to my neighbor Alvin. He asked me what best to do with it. Needs a boiler made to match and a job to do. He lives way back in the woods off grid, so the job is easy enough to find. Firewood processing and hauling is one job that's common, portable generator perhaps. Intermittent jobs where firing a small steam engine would not be considered inconvenient to get the job done. I got to thinking perhaps we could put together a small 4x4 platform and make it self propelled, like a small truck not much bigger than a good size lawn mower. I have enough steel to put together a stout little vertical firetube boiler. mostly of half inch steel with sch 40 steel tubes. So it could drive around, slow off road of course, haul small loads of wood or anything desired as a little utility vehicle. It could generate enough electric to run electric chain saw, and maybe run a kenetic log splitter. Kind of a scaled down version of my larger one. Possibly a project for winter if I don't find myself too busy with other stuff to do something with it.

Quote
ReubenT
Just got to wandering if anyone is working on steam projects, custom vehicles or something. I've been working on the concept of heating greenhouses without outside input

This hits like a lighting bolt..

I have always wondered if the Bio 2 projects were learned from. What if we could introduce an external combustion to the Bio sphere system...
There has been some recent High rise projects turning the buildings in to greenhouses. .

My ideal life is to live in a tropical garden, eat the fruits of it fresh from the plants, then for side occupation build steam engines of various kinds, and fool with various energy inventions. Getting the greenhouse thing going is the first part, and they have to run really cheap.

I have several ideas to work on. One is a cavitation water heater, which is supposed to create steam instantly when turned on if it spins fast enough. And it's supposed to run extraordinarily efficient. I don't know if it would be practical to run a steam engine on, probably not, but could heat greenhouses. I might try a steam boiler application just fer an experiment. I'd just need a hot water seal on the shaft, I have graphite impregnated steam shaft packing, I suppose that would do a rotating shaft as well as a linear sliding shaft. But leak proof for super heated water? And it has to run at something towards 10,000 RPM. I have an inverter duty 3 hp 3 phase motor rated to 18,000 RPM to play with, and just got in a VFD to run anything up to 10 HP. There's a tuned bell water heater that's supposed to run 20 times more efficient than standard stuff, and then a spiral grooved cone shaped turbine oil heater that's supposed to run 30 times better than normal. Either one would reduce heating expense to nil. My brother and I talk of possibly building a small steam power plant using the local abundant supply of hardwood sawmill byproduct for fuel, run it through a biochar kiln and use the wood gas off the system to fire the boiler. Two outputs to sell, biochar and electricity. But that's down the road a ways yet. A few greenhouses come first. But right now I'm making custom parts for generator experiments. The first one looks promising. second try has a weird anomaly, I think it's working but seems to have an internal phase clash. 3rd variation is ready to put together and it will be isolated to avoid any phase issues.

Someone is going to have to explain this bit about cavitation steam generation to me. I've heard it a few times and neither the physics nor the engineering seem to line up.

As a Navy Machinists' Mate, I was pretty familiar with cavitation as it is a pretty common failure mode for centrifugal pumps and propellers. The rapidly turning rotor generates vapor bubbles which can cause a pump impeller to lose suction or even damage a propeller if the bubbles are in surface contact and collapse, causing very tiny water hammers against the propeller surface.

The thing is, however, that this vapor is caused by a very severe pressure drop due to hydrodynamic action. In other words, the vapor is being generated at very low temperatures because the water in the immediate vicinity is far below atmospheric pressure. At 1/2 psi absolute, we can generate steam at 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Neither this pressure nor temperature seems very usable.

The other thing is, why generate steam by mechanical action? This means you have to take some energy source, convert it to mechanical energy and then take the vapor off to use the heat. Anytime you transfer energy from one form to another, there's a loss. Your best bet would seem to be to do the thing as directly as you can. Actually, that isn't necessarily true for something like heating buildings. In the correct environmental conditions, it's awfully hard to beat heat pumps -- they still expend power in their use but part of the output comes from "pumping" heat from another source.

Regards,

Ken

The reason I like this idea is that biomass fuel, not petrol can make a carbon neutral environment in a Biosphere experiment.

you get the idea, fire makes CO2, and biomass produces oxygen as plants. This is one of the big ideas growing corn as fuel.

I also like the idea of a salt water pool, large tank. you could easily support soft shell oysters as food source for the blue crab. Blue crab is a good a food source for people.. Also the waste from eating blue crab is a good source of fertilizer.

trust me I could go into it on many levels.I have done extensive research on biomass systems.

Who knows this type thinking could be used to make a Mars base camp.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/02/2019 10:20PM by Jeremy Holmes.

Apparently the popping of those cavitation vacuum bubbles causes a lot of heat to build up, and so intentionally creating them in a confined space can make more heat than the energy used to spin the drum can account for. But then there's sonic wave generated cavitation that promises far more efficiency than the spinning drum. So there's more stuff to experiment with. Just put cavitation heater into youtube search and a number of things come up. Those drums full of blind holes is the one version. The sonic resonance bell or globe is another.

I get too technically minded sometimes. We have a couple caves on and under our place. About decided to simplify things a bit, build a greenhouse down next to the small cave and try to come up with an off grid blower to move air through the cave into the greenhouse. Convection might move the air but that might not move it fast enough. Then perfect the steam powered backup machines for firewood processing and orchard maintenance. Perhaps we can find resources to dig a large bore hole into the large cave, and make a much larger greenhouse to use that geo thermal source. And then if I can manage to figure out the sonic water heater, which appears to be heating with cavitation from high and low pressure wave zones in the water. We could expand to put a greenhouse anywhere.

As for CO2 carbon. Burning wood is seen as zero since it's just cycling carbon through plant material, out of the air and back into the air. When a tree dies it rots and the carbon returns to the air anyway. Trapping some of it in charcoal and burying it in the ground is seen as beneficial both to keep it out of the air permanently and for building soil carbon for better fertility. But pumping hydro carbon liquids stored in the earth from ancient organic matter breakdown and burning it back into the air is seen as adding way more carbon than the atmosphere can handle. If at one time long ago the earth had far more land mass, and far more abundant growth of live plant material. All that carbon would have been trapped in trees and plants. Then it was buried and turned into coal and oil. But if it's pulled out and burned, with our much more limited live plant base to convert it back to cellulose fiber. It could cause issues in time unbalancing the CO2/oxygen/nitrogen balance. Ideally with more CO2 in the air the plant life will grow faster and soak up more of it. But considering how so much earth space is in ocean and desert, it could take a lot longer to reestablish a balance with men continuing to push it into imbalance.

We have the nasty situation where the extremely wealthy men of earth who make their wealth from oil have been very hard handed against all viable alternatives, because anything that promises to replace oil would cancel out their wealth. Those men are so wealthy they can do anything to anybody and get away with it. They've hired several inventors assassinated who came up with some means of running vehicles without oil. We can't win against them, all we can do is stay out of their way and let them ruin the earth an wreck the environment. It matters not how high one's position or how important one becomes, if ya get in their way it's off with yer head. I know how things will end up and it's not very nice for earth short term, but wonderful when everything gets reworked after evil is wiped out.

I could use some extra funding to get things going. But I'll go with what I have and maybe once I prove results someone will kick in with some funding to expand. I have a friend in KY who's coming to visit, maybe next week. We'll share with him what we want to do and see if he's interested in helping out. He's my age, a retired navy vet, (on full early retirement due to a sub accident he suffered and got excessive radiation exposure) He needs a dedicated purpose in life and has money to spare. So we'll see if we can get him on board with the nutrient dense food growing system with it's wonderful benefits to health. It does have significant gain potential in marketable produce, and in helping people get well who need health improvement. With steam power as a functional aid may well be something that will help it work. My foundry and machine shop waits for something to make, soon as we can figure out exactly what needs to be made.

I think you have a good way to start. Have you factored about grow lighting. If you can power lights with a steam engine you will have it made.

Also you can use a storage battery.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/26/2019 03:04PM by Jeremy Holmes.

Hi all,

I thought I would throw in my useless 3 cents of useless information here.

Jeremy I've looked over your work, and it's quite impressive. Several paths you have gone down have never been considered by anyone before. It's good work. And that should be worth something, right?

Myself, I invented a supercritical boiler for powerplants that uses half the fuel. Would be great, to save your average powerplant a half million dollars a day. But when I talk to them? I say the word steam, and they act like I stole their wife or something. And these are people who are in the steam powergen business! But they aren't looking for anything new that isn't 'renewable'.

The hysterical mad rush to everything 'renewable' and 'green' makes people think of steam as the enemy.

It all makes me sick.

Kyle

I think I have an answer as to why there was no interest in the boiler.

According to the International Journal for Research in Applied Science & Engineering Technology (IJRASET), the efficiency of a supercritical boiler is about 93.75 percent.

(ISSN: 2321-9653; IC Value: 45.98; SJ Impact Factor:6.887 Volume 5 Issue IX, September 2017)

Supercritical Boiler Efficiency

This seems pretty reasonable given that most steam car boilers run in the 80 to 85 percent range and their pressures and temperatures are much lower. The only way to use half the fuel would be to boost efficiency to 187.5 percent, which violates the Law of Conservation of Energy. As you can see, there's no boiler losses that can be easily reduced:

Table 6.1 Boiler Losses& Efficiency.

Item Unit Imported Coal*
Losses due to unburnt carbon % 0.1279
Dry gas loss % 4.7
Moisture in fuel loss % 0.268
Hydrogen in fuel loss % 0.590
Loss due to carbon monoxide % 0.00
Air moisture Loss % 0.075
Other losses % 0.3
Radiation losses % 0.18
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total losses % 6.24
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Boiler efficiency % 93.75
=====================================================

The biggest loss here is dry gas loss --- and you can't really get around that unless you can subcool the feedwater far below freezing temperature ... of course, that makes no sense (even if it were possible) because you would be intentionally throwing heat away in order to to gain a small bit of boiler efficiency, thereby violating the concept of minimum condensate depression.

Regards,

Ken



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/28/2019 10:33PM by frustrated.

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