steam!

Robert J. Harris bob at bobthecomputerguy.com
Sun Sep 15 17:45:11 GMT 1996


Remember the Reichstag

----------
> From: talltom <talltom at teleport.com>
> To: diy_efi at coulomb.eng.ohio-state.edu
> Subject: Re: steam!
> Date: Saturday, September 14, 1996 11:59 PM
> 
> 
>   Allright! Anybody got any good ideas about how to reclaim the water
when it's
> been thru the engine?(Water isn't as plentyful as it used to be) Short of
making
> a deal with wppss(Another conceptually and financially bankrupt govt. -
> washington public power supply system.) on a unused cooling tower that
is.?
>
If you are truly interested in steam engines, the late 40's Americans seem
to
represent the height of the technology.  The south Africans used condensers
and recycled the water on some of their steam engines.  On many tender 
mounted booster engines the low pressure exhaust steam was vented directly
back into the water supply.

With a steam piston engine, transmissions are totally useless.  Cut of
steam = 
parked, stopped - no need to idle.  Move valve to "forward", go forward. 
Move
valve to reverse, go backwards.  Change direction by changing how steam 
admitted.  RPM limit is the destruction limit of engine.  Torque limit is
by PSI 
and size of piston.  Think of how small loco pistons were in comparison to
the 10,000 plus ton loads they sometimes carried.   Also, road locomotives
were almost universally limited to 300 PSI or less.

What you will have is the problems of external combustion and water
recycling
to have sufficient range.   Railroads had water towers at frequent
intervals to
avoid carrying more than a couple of hundred tons of water and coal at a
time.

If they told you about 1200 PSI steam and the power from it, remember that 
it is made at half the temperature reached in an IC engine.  For the
skeptics,
remember - 1cc of liquid water state changed to vapor (boiled) makes about
1800 cc of vapor.  Not a bad little expansion ration.

What I am tying to do is first build a self tuning controllable EFI for
petrol fuels
and then, inject a precisely metered amount of additional H2O to get the
power
of steam from the excess heat and avoid all the external combustion
hassles.  

No it would not be as efficient as an external combustion engine, but it
would
be far simpler and I believe could develope a lot more power than the same
amount of fuel in a straight IC engine.



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