Besler Steam Plane

[old man emu]

An almost perfect solution!

[onetrack]

But it's not steam powered!? It would be interesting to test the potential of a Tesla turbine, as a steam power unit.

[Geoff_H]

Definitely a water tube, they are much lighter with much larger surface area

[turboplanner]

Steam power wasn't without its risk. The heating and generation of steam, and power, had to be matched to the power demand at a given time for the application. With a train it's relatively straightforward; Maximum power is needed as the train pulls out of the station, then it's easy going until the next station where the ground is flat.

 

However a steam tractor might have a low power demand until a tree had to be pulled down, or a sawmill engine may have spentmuch of the day at idle as horses pulled logs into place on the table and they were set up, then required an immediate burst of full power to cut the log, returning to idle after it was done.

 

The engine driver was the computer and had to make complex decisions on when to start stoking the boiler without getting too much heat into it.

 

Safety valves were designed to help him by letting steam go if the boiler generated too much, but sometimes the need exceeded the valve capacity.

 

If the boiler ran out of water or got too hot, a lead plug was designed to melt and allow the excess pressure to escape, and that was the limiting factor on power.

 

Some enterprising saw mill owners replaced the lead plug with brass or steel, to get more power for faster production, and my great-uncle was thrown across a road and killed when the boiler of one of these saw mills blew up.

 

A few train engines were lost through excess pressure and this photo shows the remains after "Mona" a Gippsland steam train locomotive let go (Photo: Peter McHugh, Victoria's Forest and Bushfire Heritage)

[Geoff_H]

For 25 years I wrote control strategies for steam power, before switching to gas turbines. The control of boilers uses steam pressure for fuel control and water desuperheating for temperature control. Well it is much more complicated than that but steam controllers are available across the counter