Posted By lownote on 02/25/2009 5:34 AM
I just finished reading a few books on the history and technology of steam locomotives, and it makes me wonder what a steam engine would be like if one were to built today, from the ground up. NOt a copy of earlier designs which are all 60 years old or older by now, long before micro electronics or computer control were even imagined. We have different materials available now. We have a different ethic in terms of energy use.
I'm guessing it would probably be a steam turbine, with a duplex drive, and would use computers to monitor the air mix, steam heat and moisture content, and regulate wheel slip like the traction control on a car. But I don't know all that much. Has anyone ever tried to take stab at designing a 21st century steam locootive?
I seriously doubt it would look anything like the steam engine we all know. It wouldn't burn fuel externally....pollution. It wouldn't use cylindars and crank pins and mechanical timing. It wouldn't include a large steam pressure vessel (boiler). It would not be "alive" in the context we use that term to describe "steam engines". In fact, it would likely be quite boring.
I had the opportunity in 1965 to work on a new steam engine design...for the Army. I was hired as a GS-4 Engineering Aide in the summer between my first two years in college and worked at Ft. Belvoir's Night Vision Lab complex in Virginia. Why the Night Vision Lab...the lab credited with developing the technology that lets our soldiers fight at night...was developing a "steam engine" was beyond me...but it paid. I sat for three months computing stuff called TITS and TOTS...with a Freiden calculator...a big mechanical contraption with hundreds of buttons on it that added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided. The focus on the specific project piece I was working on was how to improve the efficiency of a "closed cycled turbine engine"...and the relationship between the Turbine Inlet Temperature (TIT) and the Turbine Outlet Temperature (TOT) was fundemental to those calculations. Generally speaking, the wider the difference between the two measures means the engine is using up more of the heat energy...and thus is more "efficient".
This turbine was part of a US Army Corps of Engineering project to develop a nuclear powered train and portable power plant. The "engine" of the train contained four elements...a nuclear reactor, a closed cycle turbine engine, a generator, and the power plant control system....oh, and it was to be a D-D chassis design. BIG. Big big big. It looked like a diesel engine on steroids (for that time period). The idea was that the nuclear reactor made steam...which was put through the closed cycle turbine...to spin the generator and make elecricity. The "used" steam was piped (yeah, right...pumped is more accurate) back to the reactor to be heated again so it could be used again. The electricity was used to run traction motors when the train needed to move...and power an Army division when it wasn't moving. It was a completey closed system...nothing escaped the "engine" or went in...no fuel, no water, no nuttin'.
That was the theory. In reality, the main effort we were doing was on how to ensure that "nothing escaped the "engine""...and as far as I know, the inability to control the thermal losses doomed the project. It was cancelled a few years after I worked that summer on it...but I earned enough money to get through my second year of college and taught me I didn't want to be a mechanical engineer.
