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The British Steam Car Challenge
Van Cutter Romney sends us word of a British steam-powered car that will attempt to set a world record speed of 200 mph. The car, constructed on a tubular chassis, holds four boilers that deliver four megawatts of power, producing 300 bhp. The current record of 127.659 mph was established in 1906. More photos and specs at the Steam Car Club of Great Britain's site.
Instead, you extract as much energy as you can, while keeping the steam hot enough at the final turbine outlet pressure to prevent the phase change. In fact, most of the energy put into the steam (in some cases 75%) is removed AFTER the steam goes through the turbine, by way of the condensers.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
Back in Ye Olden Tymes (TM), it wasn't at all clear how those newfangled horseless carriages were going to be powered. There were electric ones, steam ones, and gasoline powered ones. Steam was a mature technology and well-understood, electric was silent but had range issues, and gasoline was just plain dangerous. Steam was the initial leader. Henry Ford selected gasoline for his Model T, and the rest was history.
With fossil fuels, greenhouse gases and all that, it doesn't matter how efficient gasoline engines are, if what they run on is too expensive to be practical. Sure, steam engines have thermodynamic limits. But they also have very nice emissions qualities, and excellent torque characteristics. I'd be very interested in seeing what a modern steam car could do.
The gasoline engine car makers actually ran FUD ads about how dangerous electric cars were. They were so quiet that you couldn't hear them coming, and risked getting run over!
...laura
Ah yes, the very important bulkhead between driver and 4MW of blue blazes and steam. Steam turbine powered craft do better on an ocean of cooling material or fixed next to a very large body of water. Launching one at 200 MPH on land is, well, crazy.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
4 megawatts is a little over 5000 horsepower. Hell, a funny car produces almost 3000 horse more than that. Don't be awed by the word "mega." And comparisons to electrical consumption aren't very relevant anyway.
The smaller the steam turbine, the less efficient it is.
If you put 9 or 10 stages in series, boost the diameter, and lower the ideal blade speed, they get much more efficient. Also, there are special low-pressure turbine designs that you can put on after the high-pressure turbines. Then you can add reheat stages, where you take out the no longer superheated, but still pretty high pressure steam, resuperheat it, then put back into the same or another turbine.
The turbine(s) now fill a building, or the aft 1/2 of an aircraft carrier, but they do a lot better at efficiently converting energy.
Back in the not so old days, the Navy used single stage turbines to run most pumps that were going to be on more or less continuously. They were still in the steam training plant at Great Lakes when I was there in 1976. But it turned out to be more efficient to run the steam to a turbo-generator, then use the electricity to run the pumps. The energy lost from condensing steam in all those small diameter lines was pretty bad by itself. Add in the low efficiency of a single stage turbine, and they were a lost cause.
Ok, I'm NOT an electrician. However, I've heard about the 60Hz cycle having its roots in the past. But with modern forms of generation, isn't 60Hz "synthesized" in order to maintain the standard now in place?
Life is not for the lazy.
Max torque ... 0 RPM. The Stanley Steamers used to be able to put one wheel on a phone pole and drive up it a few feet.
Yup. That advantage came with the development of kettering ignition. Prior to that most internal combustion engines used glow ignition, where you had to heat the external part of the ignition system with a blowtorch until it was hot enough. The same sort of system is still used in model airplane engines, but their electric glow plugs make them a lot easier to start.
The local electric car club have a 1912 Detroit, albeit with modern lead-acid batteries replacing the original Edison cells. I've ridden in it; it feels like a telephone booth on wheels. But except for a slight whirr from the driveline, it's silent. These were the cars that made people like Henry Ford nervous.
...laura
A steam engine is an external combustion engine with excellent torque and pretty decent power/weight. As such it can be made less polluting and potentially more efficient than an internal combustion engine. When it comes to energy transfer from one medium to another, inefficiencies and losses occur at every step or conversion of one form to another and the steam engine can get away with fewer conversions. What's more, a steam engine only needs a heat source to provide energy for operation. One can mechanical motion directly from the thermally induced expansion - and it's possible to reduce that motion down to minimal levels while not having a transmission, unlike internal combustion engines. And, if youre worried about co2, an external combustion situation can be better controlled for capturing and sequestering carbon than could be an internal combustion situation. Also, being external combustion, it's not picky and choosy over what is burned. There is even a stirling engine which can use the same techniques on ambient air using solar energy.