Gallery, Projects and General > The Design Shop

Daft idea? Flash steam engine..

(1/5) > >>

John Hill:
So many daft ideas I cant get started on any of them! :coffee:

So here is another one...

A simple 'steam' engine, single cylinder with water jacket.

A simple (if there is such a thing) injector pump would inject hot water into a hole drilled into a block of copper which would be kept really hot by a flame. As soon as the water entered the block it would flash to steam and be passed to the cylinder to do the work of pushing the piston down.

Now for the vague bits, I know the cylinder must be kept hot otherwise the flashed steam would immediately condense and nothing useful would happen.  I wonder if a water jacket would be hot enough, but if I used a jacket filled with oil how hot could I have it?  The oil would be heated by passing through the same copper block as generates the steam.

Any opinions?

Thanks

PTsideshow:
I don't know about your version as it seems to be more complicated than the original flash steam boilers and boats that were used for the speed test and trials in the 20's and 30's.
http://madmodder.net/index.php/topic,413.0.html
http://madmodder.net/index.php/topic,408.0.html

Are two of the better books on the subject. If you haven't seen or read them.
 :thumbup:

vtsteam:
John, the copper block isn't a bad idea, but lets morph that:

If you lengthened the block of copper to get more flame area on it, and more water contact surface in the hole, you might carry that on until you reduced the width dimension so that you essentially had a long square tube. Trimming the corners off of that and making it round would make it easier to manufacture and further reduce the cost of the copper while increasing further the rate of heat transfer. Of course you'd need a very long flame for something like that. So you would coil it up to make it more compact. And so we've arrived at the coiled monotube.

But i have no doubt that for a very small engine, a fairly large block of copper would produce some steam. It doesn't have to be a single hole, but could be a gallery of holes, looking on end like a bee's honeycomb. Header blocks at the end could connect the tubes in series or parallel, however desired, and in fact you could alternate water tubes with hot gas tubes. It's a heat exchanger.

It is expensive and difficult to make however. A block of copper is dear, and you'd have to drill a lot of that expensive material away. And that's a lot of drilling work and header fabrication, too.

Still, maybe it has some advantages for some purpose. Seems robust and compact, and those are good things.  :beer:

John Hill:
The idea of the hot copper block is to have semi-internal steam generation. The block would be fixed to the cylinder head and steam only produced at the point in time where it is required (piston near TDC).  There would be no inlet valve as timing would be controlled by the stroke of the injector pump and speed controlled by the stroke of the injector pump.

A chunk of copper is not hard to find, just look for an old style wooden handled soldering iron.

The copper block is to store heat from the heat source (flame) until it is needed as steam production would be a very intermittent process, not continuous.

vtsteam:
I guess one question you will have to answer then is whether you can get enough heat into the water via the block in that interval,

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page