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Steam related discussions.
Re: Steam turbine driven turbojet - 3 months ago
Rolly, There's a group of SACA members, largely out of Canada, who have started an LSR project. I haven't heard of any recent progress. CAD drawings for the cylinder head components have been drawn up, as have a lot of calculations and specifications for the overall powerplant and vehicle. Basically, it's a converted 3-53 Jimmy and a forced recirculation (Lamont) boiler. Regards, Kenby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Steam turbine driven turbojet - 3 months ago
For the last few years of his life, I corresponded with Jim Crank on an average of at least once a day. As it turns out, it was never his plan to use a turbine in an LSR car. He had an unexpected opportunity to buy a bunch of hardware from the Lear bus project for an essentially negligible price -- something like a hundred bucks, but don't take that exact price as gospel. This was quite a bargaby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Steam turbine driven turbojet - 3 months ago
The turbine came from the Lear bus program. Tom Kimmel has one of the turbine rotors, not the whole unit, unfortunately.by frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Steam turbine driven turbojet - 3 months ago
A Pelton wheel certainly doesn't sound like the most efficient turbine layout imaginable, a pure impulse turbine seems like it would have fewer losses -- I've seen one of the rotors built by Lear that Jim Crank used, it was immediately recognizable as a classic impulse rotor. I have some serious concerns about trying to power vehicles with single-stage turbines, it will undoubtedly work but the efby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Steam turbine driven turbojet - 3 months ago
I'm sorry, Novice, but that didn't actually answer my question. Do you have any ideas as to number of stages, types of staging, configuration of rotors and so on? If anything, the number of turbomachinery iterations can challenge the number of reciprocating designs. The British LSR car may not be a preferred example since they took months in the Desert and something like a million dollars to doby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Steam turbine driven turbojet - 3 months ago
Just out of curiosity, what type of turbine layout are you looking at?by frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Steam turbine driven turbojet - 3 months ago
Hi Rick, I met the owner of the Lear car at Tom Kimmel's. One of the biggest problems with the Lear Indy car was that the designer conned Lear into getting the job, he had no real expertise in the field. To give you an idea how bad it was, it was only AFTER they built the car that someone realized that they had dramatically underestimated the condenser requirements. As it was, there was noby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Steam turbine driven turbojet - 3 months ago
Rolly, I never said that they injected oil into the steam system. The steam in the turbine bearings would force its way into the bearings and then travel through the lubrication system as condensate.. These were either 600 psi nuclear systems or 1200 psi superheated units. I'm not sure you'd want to go above 1,200 psi superheat in an aviation application -- it was challenging enough onboard sby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Steam turbine driven turbojet - 3 months ago
One of your bigger challenges is going to be lubricating oil contamination by condensate. Every steam turbine system that I have worked with had centrifugal purifiers to remove the water from the oil -- we kept the main engines on the purifiers for 12 hours a day and the turbogenerators on the purifier for 8. The rest of the time was allocated for disassembling, cleaning and reassembling the puriby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: The Effect of Low Feedwater! - 4 months ago
Hey Chuk, And this is good graphic evidence explaining Bonneville's fear of Stanley type boilers. Actually, I think any sort of drum that is directly heated by the furnace should be avoided at all costs. It would arguably be better to fit the drum in a Bosolver or Ofeldt off to the side rather than directly above the burner. Even when the storage volume is unheated, it's awfully easy to mby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: need some advice on gears - 4 months ago
Just for the heck of it, insert two straight shafts into the gearbox and measure their parallelism quite carefully. If they are out a little bit, the forces can be concentrating on one side of the gear teeth. I ran into a gear box some years ago, built by a big name gear company, and someone slipped up on quality control --- with similar results to yours.by frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Someone found a steam corvair in a junkyard. - 4 months ago
This association with the engine and Besler appears to be a bit of misreading. I found a reprint of a copy of the old Steam Automobile Quarterly somewhere in this thread and, on the right-hand side of the spread, it showed Bill Besler's obituary --- on the left-hand side it showed Joe Ellison's Corvair conversion. I think someone didn't read carefully and juxtaposed the two articles into one conby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Full Steam Proposal for Auto Mfrs - 5 months ago
Hi Rick, Ingrained? A lot of people have bought the Elon Kool-Aid. Tesla consistently announces vehicle launch dates and then overshoots --- drastically. Far from being a manufacturing marvel, it's a bit of a joke in the industry. No other car company would get away with that, but he's running a cult and his followers loudly denounce anyone who points this out. The fact that he came out lasby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Full Steam Proposal for Auto Mfrs - 5 months ago
Maybe I should write about this, again, since I actually work in the powertrain development process for a major American automotive manufacturer. Quite honestly, a good idea will get you absolutely nowhere. Thomas Edison referred to "5 percent inspiration and 95 percent perspiration" and that holds as true today as it did then, maybe even more so since so many of the really basic ideby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Full Steam Proposal for Auto Mfrs - 5 months ago
Rick, As I mentioned before, this particular topic is related to a proposal to automotive manufacturers, meaning the car has to be state-of-the-art. The Stanley engine is highly inefficient, any presumably practical modern engine would not be throwing the same large amount of waste heat out of the exhaust. A modern car would also have a thermostatically regulated condenser in order to preventby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Full Steam Proposal for Auto Mfrs - 5 months ago
I'd certainly argue that batteries represent a better path forward...and they are improving. Allegedly, Volkswagen just came up with a way to prevent lithium from catching fire --- this means we can utilize a higher precentage lithium and extend battery range another 50 percent. There's other chemistries and processes, including nanotech, that promise to likewise boost battery performance. Nikoby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Full Steam Proposal for Auto Mfrs - 5 months ago
Hi Rick, The problem is that you are taking a component valuable in one tiny niche of steam technology and trying to apply it across the entire field. Note that the title of this thread is "Full Steam Proposal for Manufacturers". This pretty much stipulates that we need a steam system that can somehow be competitive in the modern market; unfortunately, feed heaters are most valuablby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Full Steam Proposal for Auto Mfrs - 5 months ago
The latent heat of vaporization has to do with the difference between reversible and irreversible processes. We can compress steam and heat it, or expand steam and cool it --- this is a reversible process. We can't do the same thing with condensation, once you reject the heat to condense the steam, that heat is gone...to the tune of 947 BTU per pound with steam. You can extract work from reversiby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Full Steam Proposal for Auto Mfrs - 6 months ago
There's a few common sense things we can establish as ground rules. 1. Minimize the number of times energy is transferred. Every transfer results in a loss and, when multiple transfers are performed, the losses are multiplied rather than added. 2. Heat engines are inherently rather inefficient --- this is something we all know, from the cycle of Carnot. 3. Rankine Cycle heat engines areby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Full Steam Proposal for Auto Mfrs - 6 months ago
The thing to consider is: "How come these prototypes haven't been built?" I don't have a PhD like the author, but I do work in powertrain development and possess a BS in Business Administration with a heavy emphasis in Economics and Accounting --- so, let's consider that to be more-or-less "the flip side". You have to step back from the theoretical and look at the proposalby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Full Steam Proposal for Auto Mfrs - 6 months ago
This ran in the Phorum some years ago, I think most of the current participants weren't around at that point. The idea was to build a stationary steam powerplant for use in places like Africa...the people behind the idea contacted SACA and a few of us came up with proposals, I believe mine was the most comprehensive, probably due to my experience in powertrain development. Actually, the idea waby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Steam turbine driven turbojet - 6 months ago
I used to operate, and repair, 5,000 psi Ingersoll-Rand N-20D, 6-stage air compressors in the Navy. The defining characteristic is heat exchangers. There were 5 intercoolers, an aftercooler, a frame cooler and an oil cooler. That's a whole lot of waste heat being dissipated. Kenby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: P fired boilers - 6 months ago
"I've always wished I could be in the engine room of a battleship at flank speed" .....Me too, guess I have to settle for the engine room of a Nimitz class supercarrier....by frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Electric batch boiler - 6 months ago
There's nothing new regarding understanding the importance of boundary layers in boiler generating surfaces, the topic has been extensively discussed in a wide number of books, in the Bulletin and inside this forum. The importance of eliminating boundary layers was widely understood close to 170 years ago --- when the first forced recirculation boilers were built. The key to eliminating bounby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Economics of advanced condensing steam locomotive - 6 months ago
I guess the biggest potential fly in the ointment is that, perhaps, neither system is the best option. Electricity would easily beat either alternative from the standpoint of energy efficiency and emissions --- not that I worry too much about emissions, sometimes you can go overboard. When you figure out how much pollutants are ejected by trucks and aircraft per ton/mile, i think that both trainby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Electric batch boiler - 6 months ago
I'm vaguely familiar with electrolysis, having experimented with an ambient temperature electrolyzer back in the 70s (that was one of the ways we were supposed to free ourselves from the tyranny of the gasoline companies --- it turned out that being their slaves was a lot better than buying the needed electricity, however.....) I also studied the topic briefly as a navy-type person assigned to sby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Electric batch boiler - 6 months ago
Steam's a non-starter on the automotive side. The lower thermal efficiency means that greenhouse gas production is always going to be higher, unless you can use some sort of renewable biofuel...and in so many cases an ICE can burn the same thing. Take my diesel Cruze --- theoretically, the pollutants are higher but between the particulate filter and urea injection, I get fairly low numbers. Toby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Electric batch boiler - 6 months ago
It's even worse than that, you can't get any power from the wind passing the car. No machine is 100 percent efficient --- this means that the energy harvested from the wind is less than the drag caused by the act of harvesting. Trying to recover energy from the wind going by the car actually decreases the overall efficiency. Energy balances are an utterly critical thing to evaluate, but it's soby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: Electric batch boiler - 6 months ago
Hmmmm.... 1000 BTU per minute? Time to break out some of that very basic math, again. According to Google: 1 BTU equals 778.169 ft-lbs so.... 1000 BTU equal 778,169 ft-lbs Of course, everyone knows that 1 horsepower equals 33,000 ft-lbs per minute 778,169 / 33,000 = 23.58087879, which is the horsepower equivalent of 1000 BTU/minute. GOSH DARN IT ... we already said that it takeby frustrated - SteamStuff
Re: New steam car book. - 6 months ago
Hey Chuk, It's on sale, now. Unfortunately, Amazon's search engine really sucks --- I couldn't find it by title. It did show up under Tom's name, however. https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AGeorge+Thomas+Kimmel+III&s=relevancerank&text=George+Thomas+Kimmel+III&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1 Regards, Kenby frustrated - SteamStuff