STEAM engined Landy ???

The general idea is not new. When diesel engines were first being introduced in ships in the early years of last century it was not uncommon to have the exhaust used for steam raising, usually for running auxilliaries, but at least one engine had diesel combustion above the pistons with steam (raised from the exhaust) below the pistons, the steam finally going to a turbine geared to the prop shaft and thence to the condenser, with the input pressure to the turbine actually being what would by most standards be a respectable vacuum. Presumably the idea was scrapped due to complexity and cheap fuel, and has not (as far as I know) been revived because modern marine diesels extract most of the exhaust energy using turbochargers.

Which raises the question - would it not be simpler to extract most of the energy from the exhaust using gas turbine(s), gearing these to the output shaft rather than going to the complexity of raising steam? This technology, known as turbo-compounding was used in the last generation of aeroplane piston engines in the 1940s &50s. JD

Interesting point. Maybe they think that production engineering a

100,000 RPM reduction box might be a bit expensive ?

Steve

Probably would be, but so would an automated steam system (which raises the question - would the driver need a boiler attendant's certificate?), and the steam turbine probably runs at much the same speed as the gas turbine, only thing is temperatures are cooler. JD

Well rover did indeed develop a gas turbine engined sports car, I think the difficulty was with the fact that it ran so hot.

Similarly a problem with the steam cars was that they eventually required so much cooling for the condenser that they could not achieve the efficiency of an internal combustion engine for the same output

There's at least one steam powered Series (II I think) chugging away slowly in Switzerland, runs on little chunks of wood. Not very fast, but great if you keep an axe handy and drive mostly in wooded areas with lots of streams. Nasty tax man doesn't get a look in.

For those of you interested in seeing how much extra weight you can add to your 2 1/4 petrol Series vehicles and how you can "upgrade" your engine to run on stuff like wood, head to one of my favourite sites on the net:

No responsibility taken for any wasted hours browsing Lindsay books site! enjoy!

Regards

William MacLeod

I'm still going to blame you for the time ive wasted looking at their books! :p. Might buy myself some christmas pressies ;)

On or around Fri, 16 Dec 2005 09:38:30 +0000, Tom Woods enlightened us thusly:

You won't want to be looking at

then...

Scania has at least one truck engine in regular production which uses turbo compounding, so the technology is definitely there to do it.

Tom Woods uttered summat worrerz funny about:

Nay mind books! get yer self some thermal overalls and get that 101 sorted, tis nearly silly season again :-)

Lee D