Steam cars

Steam engines don't throttle well. I'd expect that the next incarnation of a steam car would be a hybrid. The electric motor and batteries would provide acceleration. Steam would run at constant output to top off the battery bank.

Hot rodding would involve more work souping up the electrics.

Fortunately no one was in the kitchen the day the walls and ceiling were paved with superheated tomatoes. Family folklore (this was before I came along) includes the theory that this happened after Grandpa had succumbed to the temptation to improve the device in some way. My mother used pressure cookers often, though carefully, in the ensuing years. They held a fascination for me at single-digit ages that did not apply to less technological and potentially disastrous means of cooking, and the explanation of how they worked was probably one of my first encounters with applied physics.

--Joe

Yes and the periodic inspections consists of (among other things) hydrostatic pressure testing the boiler to something like 10 times the max operating pressure as well as testing to see if all the devices that are intended to keep the pressure from exceeding the maximum are in working order.

-jim

Wait, I thought the advantage of the steam engine was that it DID throttle well, that is it produces almost constant torque at any RPM. Because they didn't need an adjustable transmission with multiple gears, they had considerable advantages in the early days.

--scott

Thanks, Tegger- good suggestion. I am joining their discussion group.

Maybe. Fuel efficiency would be the biggest challenge -- I've read that some efforts at a new-generation steam car died off about 1973-4 with the first wave of the energy crisis. For that matter, the Stanley Steamer was no economy champ, as cars of its modest size went, at ten miles to the gallon of kerosene (and about the same per gallon of water (hopefully pretty "soft" water if you're losing that much!) Back then, the raising and use of steam was a pretty mature technology but the internal combustion engine was just starting its evolution, and proved to have a lot of untapped potential.

My hunch is that steam scales up wonderfully but doesn't scale down so well. Great way to heat a downtown district, propel a ship, or turn bulk fuels into electricity. Pretty decent to drive a locomotive. Practical but marginal in a lot of ways for cars.

The ability to raise steam with non petrochemical fuels might help steam cars make more sense in some scenarios, but that sounds to me more like a bad remake of "The African Queen" than what we think of as transportation today -- and if we remain a technological society, plug hybrids seem a lot more likely.

I can see a steam car being great fun as a techno-hobby and a real attention getter in parades, but the way the world worked out, its demise as everyday transportation is understandable...

--Joe

Ad absurdum per aspera wrote in news:b4b8f5ad-8632- snipped-for-privacy@f40g2000pri.googlegroups.com:

From what I've read, steam engines are tremendously expensive to build on the scale of (and for the sell price of) an automotive engine.

Steam requires a large amount of maintenance in daily use. Steam is more complex for the driver than an a car with an internal combustion engine. Ever looked inside the cockpit of a Stanley?

The 1925 Doble steam engine -- otherwise an engineering tour de force -- still required 90 seconds to buld up a driveable head of pressure. Then it had to be "blown down" at the end of the day. An ICE in 1925 was up and running in seconds, and required no effort to shut down at night.

Petro-fueled ICEs are the best available in all ways right now. They will continue to be so until somebody figures out a practical, cheap, safe way of storing electricity. Personally, I think the future lies in electricity storage.

But IC cars of the era of the Stanley were more complex to operate than today's cars too. Often one needed to control spark timing, carb mixture, etc.

I am sure today's technology could automate the operation of steam adequately. A well designed flash boiler could probably cut the warmup time substantially, though never to zero.

While the steam car would never beat the IC engined car on efficiency, one good thing about steam in today's world is that they will run on any liquid that will burn, so fuel cost might be lower, helping overcome the lesser efficiency.

I wonder if a coal slurry system would work in a car. Of course, the greenhouse gas emission would say this is not a good idea. Better to run a steam car on a biofuel. Should be very easy to develop a practical biofuel for a steamer.

The old Mississippi steamboats sometimes exploded. The boilers either got tired or, sometimes, the engineer, urged on by the boat's owners, tied down the relief valve to get more pressure and therefore more speed out of the boat in order to make more money. When all that superheated water in the boiler turns to vapor when the boiler splits, the huge amount of expansion blows the whole boat and almost everyone in it to tiny bits. Anyone not shredded is scalded. I wouldn't want to see steam cars running around, considering the condition of some of the autos presently operated by people who won't look after them.

Dan

Some of those old Mississippi River Steamboats were so overloaded, they were swampin water too. When I was in Saint Louis back in the 1960s, I roade the Admiral Steamboat Paddlewheeler twice.I sure did enjoy that too. cuhulin

Those old boats mostly all used fire tube boilers with LOTS of boiler capacity, so there was a LOT of energy stored in boiler.

Most steam cars that actually made it into production used (a more or less) flash boiler, with much less steam capacity, so a boiler explosion was not so catastrophic. So it is not quite comparable. Also, those big steam tractors were either fire tube or else water tube with a very large steam capacity. So explosions with them were no fun either.

Yes, they did. Materials of construction (types of steel, riveted, etc) were not space age, nor was the treatment of the water used in the boiler.

Caustic cracking, fatigue, internal corrosion, plus the fact that some may have tried to run the boilers too long without routine inspection and maintenance could have been issues.

You know, the White Star line "Titanic" is said to have been vulnerable because of the poor quality steel that was available and used in its construction in those days.

Same would have inevitably been true of boilers of the 19th century.

I have read before, years ago, the iron/steel plates that composed the exterior of the old Titantic Ship had considerable slag in the metal.Nowadays, modern (metalagy?, spelling) metals technology is much better than way back then.

I also read that the guy in the Crows Nest haden't taken his binoculars/telescope up there with him, and the Captain of the Titantic Ship was ''racing'' to make up for lost time.There are some other ''issues'' concerning the Titantic Ship too.

Were there some people (Irish?) down below in the Titantic Ship whom were not allowed to get out of there to seek safety?

My old buddy retired from U.S.Navy, thirty something years he put in there.He was on the old USS Ticonderoga Ship for four yeas back in the

Dan_Thomas snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote in news:c094c1b5-c092-4f1f-b07d- snipped-for-privacy@l33g2000pri.googlegroups.com:

Ship/locomotive/stationary boilers exploded with some regularity. One of Mark Twain's own brothers (Henry) was killed in one such explosion. Nobody then quite understood just why boilers blew up, so explosions were considered a hazard of the industry.

Metallurgy was little understood in those days, and the controlling mechanical devices were much less than reliable. This is well-known.

It wasn't until insurance companies began investigations into such matters with an eye to reducing claims, and until the US Army ran into problems with its new high-powered rifles in the early 1900s, that the science of metallurgy became better than alchemy.

That sounds good until you read Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi".

Grounding a boat was far more costly than simply having it be late for arrival. If you went too fast, especially upriver (when they stuck close to the shoreline), you stood a huge risk of grounding the boat.

Twain doesn't mention it in his books, but when a pilot he was responsible for more than one grounding...

As was Mark Twain's brother.

Automotive steam boilers operate somewhat differently from the boilers that drove ships and trains. Not the same safety danger at all.

One big problem was letting the water get too low. This uncovered part of the boiler directly exposed to the firebox. The metal then got very much overheated (red hot).

Someone would then notice the water was too low, and immediately add water- a BAD thing to do. The superheated metal flashed the water to steam at a high rate. The orifice in the safety valve could only let out steam at a fixed rate, slower than the superheated metal was generating it. So the steam pressure increased very rapidly, exceeding the strength of the boiler. Whenever the water gets too low, the proper procedure is to bank the fire, and when everything cools down, carefully inspect the whole boiler. But even today folks blow boilers by adding water to an overheated, low water boiler.

And that is what happened at the Medina County Fair in Ohio when the tractor referenced earlier blew. The owner drove the tractor to the fairgrounds with low water. The crown sheet came apart and the boiler blew.

I like that Boat that was in the African Queen old movie. cuhulin

So, I am a little bit drunk today.

Up and down the floor again,,,,,, The nights of the Kerry dancin,,,,,,

Braveheart is on the A&E channel.

I think of slurries, too, as one of those things that scale up better than they scale down.

In today's New York Times is an article about turbine engines that mentions something I hadn't known about: a GM experiment in using very finely powdered coal to directly fire a turbine (no steam involved). This apparently happened in the very late 70s or early 80s

-- the test mule was a '78 Eldorado, and the R&D effort was born of the energy crisis.

The problem with the latter scenario is that those societies had highly local and distributed economies. Many of us as individuals, and most or all Western societies as a whole, are dependent on mobility; the question is how best to get it, not whether we need it....

--Joe

--Joe