steam!

[John Napoli]

Good luck with your project.  Sounds intriguing.

John

On Sun, 15 Sep 1996, Robert J. Harris wrote:

> 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.
>