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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.
that this car is "hot"? would I be ensured a "steamy ride" on this? :)
I bet this turns out to be nothing but a bunch of hot air!
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
Oh...wait.
Nevermind.
These stories are free but worth money.
4 mega watts? You could power a small town with that.
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Should be well over 4000 bhp, since one bhp is 746 watts. Looks like an amazing amount of conversion loss there.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The problem with steam engines is the condenser system, which tends to be bulky and weigh a lot. If you are going to go open cycle, an appropriate choice for a short distance racer, a high pressure system can have very high power. In such a situation you have your high power boilers fed by a high pressure pump and exiting a turbine, which is geared down to the wheels. ZOOM!
From TFA's Seventh Sentence:
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What's the point of this? Steam reached the peak of its development for transportation in the 1920s. Thermodynamically you can't do much better than 25% efficiency and that's with all the technology you can muster. More typically you only get 10%. The focus for engineers should be transportation that doubles car efficiency to 60 - 70%. Not halves it.
One of the stated aims is to generate excitement around alternative fuels, and yet it runs on LPG.
Very curious.
Dunx
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And where does this coal come from? Carbon. And where does carbon come from? Exploding stars. YOU PEOPLE HAVE TO KILL STARS JUST SO YOU CAN DRIVE A CAR! Won't anyone think of the stars?
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Your reply completed the experience by adding a pedantic correction of a trivial grammatical flaw! :-)
Just teasing. You are correct, of course.
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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.
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"The current record of 127.659 mph was established in 1906"
Actually, from TFA, the accepted speed was 121.57mph over one kilometer.
Regardless, I am very, very impressed by the above.
With the advent of better machining, lighter materials, and vastly better bearing and bushing technology etc of today, this makes the 1906 record all the more incredible.
I am going to make a fairly spectacular statement. This small team, in 1906, was as clever as the 14 person combined team that is doing the current days project.
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It's interesting all the people they list at the end with their credentials. However, someone with experience at designing high capacity high pressure boilers is noteable by his absence from the list. (The heat exchangers listed in one fellow's brief biography are almost, but not quite the same thing.)
One of the pictures on another page shows the water becoming superheated steam inside one of the boilers - seemingly in the last of the four boilers. Though much depends on the exact layout of the tubes in their boiler, normally superheaters are behind a wall of other tubes. It is very easy to overheat a superheater - leading to tube failure.
But most interestingly - there is no steam seperator between the water tubes and the superheater. This will make it easier (trivial in fact) for a slug of water to reach the turbine if things go pear shaped.
If you think a car needs to burn coal in order to be a "Steam Car", then you're seriously out of it. Conventional steam cars burn a variety of fuels, including gasoline.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_car
Steam engines are valued for their excellent power to weight ratios, general efficiency, and greater torque capacity. They also have fewer moving parts so maintenece schedules are quite good, as long as you don't leak your working fluid. (i.e. Water) Thankfully it's quite easy to replace lost water, and can be done as part of regular maintenece. (Think: Flushing and replacing water while changing oil.)
Or maybe you're trying to be funny. It's hard to tell.
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4 megawatts is 5.2 THOUSAND horsepower. If the turbine were 28% efficient, should be over a 1,400 bhp car.
Comparing a ground based turbine set up to a mobile IC is a bit off.
A steam plant on the ground actually spins, in the US, at a constant 60rpms when all is said done, that's how we get power at 60hz. In fact, one of the little known things about the power grid is that demand on the grid can actually "pull" on the generators, turning them into motors or slowing them down. In extreme cases, it is possible to physically damage the generator. Tales of bent shafts due to fluctuations in demand are common.
It should be obvious from that anecdote alone, that the physical requirements for land based power stations are vastly different. I rule out natural gas as a solution right away simply because its widely known with the industry that the country screwed up in the 1990s and built too many gas peakers and quite literally burned all the natural gas in Texas. Coal is coming back into vogue because the administration is friendlier and it is so cheap. So what does a coal plant do? Coal based plants today have onsite apparatus to powderize and dry the mile long trains of coal that they burn every month. Because the coal is powderized so finely, dust is everywhere. Coal plants are not clean. Even with today's high efficiency, combustion is not perfect and neither is the water used to make the steam with. Crews must periodically bring down the boiler, get inside there, and clean it out. It is truly a dirty job that requires special, well paid people to do. I should add, as an aside, that many coal plants are so old that utilities often have machine shops of their own to make their own parts with for maintenance.
All of this stuff weighs a lot. Automakers do a remarkable job fitting an engine and a motor / generator into a hybrid car, but I think adding a boiler would throw off the whole scheme. In order for a boiler to be really good, you need a lot of pressure, and in order to have pressure, you need a strong boiler and that means weight. Then, in addition to your fuel, you need to have a ready supply of water everywhere. If you read about the history of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, you'll see that they tried to bring steam engines into a competitive league with the diesels emerging in the 1930s, but the water was the deal breaker.
Bottom line is, if you wanted to have a mode of transportation that has you running for fuel and water both, asks you to bring a shovel along so you can shovel your ton of fuel a week into it, and requires you to do a periodic job of scrubbing out dirty tubing, and, in an accident, may literally blow up and kill you and everyone else in your car, then steam transporation is for you.
But I think steam power is best left to the professionals at your local energy company, and your best way to use it is with an electric car.
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As one who adores steampunk, I'm extremely disappointed to find that this car looks positively modern and computer designed.
Of course I understand they are trying to break records and aerodynamics is a factor, but surely a few pipes, wrought iron and wood paneling wouldn't hurt too much? Fast it may be, but desirable? Nay sir, I fear this contraption is not for gentlemen.
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.
The heat source for a steam engine is pretty irrelevant, especially for the couple of minutes it takes for a speed record run. All you need is anything that burns and enough draft to make a big enough fire.
Some gas turbines have been powered by an air/coal-dust mixture. That approach is hopped up enough to run a jet engine, but is still "coal-powered". Would you disqualify that as well?
I thought iron was the first to require a net energy input, but I can't be bothered to look.
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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.
The water in the engine doesn't have to be potable though, so that argument is kind of weak.
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.