single acting enclosed crankcase

A special section just for steam engines and boilers, as without these you may as well fit a sail.
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barts
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Re: single acting enclosed crankcase

Post by barts » Fri Nov 10, 2017 6:28 am

lostintime wrote:I did not mean to start a debate on efficiency, diesels won, I believe different applications warrant different approaches, my goal is a sail auxiliary that uses it's ballast weight as lead acid batteries for ports and dull drums, and a recharge system that can run on about anything that burns. An efficient (relatively speaking) power unit to "recharge" if I cant regenerate from the prop. I'd love to have a big slow turner to pass the free days, but then id be too busy boating to build a boat...
Sorry - I missed this entirely somehow.

Where are you headed w/ this boat? The true doldrums are too large to traverse with lead acid batteries; they're about +- 5 degrees around the equator or something around 600 miles. Solar panels would help here, of course, but w/ power limited to ~200W/m^3 it will be slow.

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Re: single acting enclosed crankcase

Post by Lionel Connell » Fri Nov 10, 2017 9:35 am

Yes, perhaps you could better describe your boat and intended voyages.

Are you looking for a way to incorporate a steam engine into your boat, or are you looking for a way to turn wood into electricity to enhance your sailing.

If you are thinking of electric propulsion, powered by batteries that are charged by a steam engine via a generator, you will have a string of losses that will achieve about 4% ( if your are lucky) of the power available from the fuel making it to the propeller.

If you have a live aboard sailboat, space for plant and fuel is going to be your biggest issue. If you are planning on sailing under steam for a hundred miles then you need to look hard at the number crunching. There are some good stories of steam/sail boats crossing the doldrums and coming out the outer side having burned half of the boat to keep the engine running.

A gasifier hooked up to a Honda generator is probably ( preparing to be shouted down) lot a better way to fill your requirement if you are not hooked on steam. The same electrical power output will be achieved with a plant weighing 1/10 as much, using half of the fuel, and not requiring a boiler certificate. A modern Honda generator is a fairly quite device. There is some science in controlling a gasifier to get good life out of an IC motor using this method, but there is plenty of good information about on the subject.

It really gets down to what turns you on.
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Re: single acting enclosed crankcase

Post by fredrosse » Fri Nov 10, 2017 3:47 pm

As far as small steam-electric plants go, there were two (that I know of) provided to charge batteries during WWII. The British model used the Stuart Sirius engine, and would burn anything that could be found. The USA version was similar, but certainly more robust (and more weight, and more expensive) and would burn anything that could be found. Around 1900 Westinghouse made many enclosed crankcase engines, always two cylinder trunk type engines, simple or compound, with a very good service record.

Plenty of power can be made with compact steam plants, the most extreme examples are the British steam hydroplane plants, packing several horsepower into a plant similar in size to a shoe box. But these plants all burn liquid fuel, run at several thousand RPM, and need all kinds of maintenance. They are also very loud, rivaling the noise of racing IC engines.

At sea with steam, you would need a condensing plant, far more complicated.
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Re: single acting enclosed crankcase

Post by cyberbadger » Sat Nov 11, 2017 12:19 am

I'm not sure I understand all the details of what you want to do, but you can make electricity at slow or fast rpm as long as you match it into a suitable range for the electric side.

I've used at least 4 different engines for stationary electrical generation, for fun.

Stuart 4a Fast 100w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AbbH1R48X0


Toledo Slow 400W
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKk9TgEoMMI


And yes, you can do much better then that if you want to, this was to amuse me and have a load to learn how to run steam stuff.

-CB
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Re: single acting enclosed crankcase

Post by lostintime » Sat Nov 11, 2017 3:18 am

Ill be completely honest, it will be years before I lay a keel. In the mean time I have access to free unlimited fuel and a utility hook up that will pay $0.10/kWh for electricity pumped back into the grid up to 20kw feed rate. I honestly hope that my system don't float can be overlooked, from reading the archives this forum seems to have the greatest collection of knowledge on power steam I can find. So here it is, PLC controlled boiler, engine, and fuel feed system fired by a modified ibert downdraft gasifier design operating on poultry litter (filtering the gas to IC engine level is cost prohibitive and to small for turbines) spinning permanent magnet 480volt three phase generators at 3600 rpm continuously. Noise, weight, and fuel storage are not presently a concern. That being said I just might be able to offer a few helpful full ideas
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Re: single acting enclosed crankcase

Post by cyberbadger » Sat Nov 11, 2017 3:47 am

Ah it's just Chicken Shit! 8-) :lol:

Actually that is one of the areas that steam is a perfect match - taking refuse and turning it into fuel. Makes a ton of sense still, a state boiler inspector commented on smokstak that he couldn't give details but he he apparently was involved with the licensing of a new steam powered sawmill. Sawmills are often way off grid, and when the cost of diesel fuel keeps going up and you look around you and all there is is huge piles of the sawdust you create it makes you think.

Rice husks to run rice mills in thailand is another example.

If you are looking for many kilowatts of electricity, have you looked at a traction engine show where they are running a power-eater?

They are making in the tens of kilowatts depending on the setup and engine running it at the time, but they are just dumping all it into huge power resistors/heating coil, which is ridiculous - they had a perfectly good fire a few steps back in the energy conversion chain. :)

-CB
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Re: single acting enclosed crankcase

Post by lostintime » Sat Nov 11, 2017 4:10 am

What can i say, shit burns, actually smells less that way. Within an 10 mile radius there is approximately 275,000 lbs per day being produced. I want a two year run on a micro pilot plant to debug the gasifier. It paying its own way is just a bonus.
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Re: single acting enclosed crankcase

Post by cyberbadger » Sat Nov 11, 2017 4:18 am

I actually know this guy. He also is a steamboater. But this is his portable his built the vft boiler to asme code himself.

But this is another example of making electricity that would work about at the steam launch scale.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyrPsDMZXF4



-CB
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Re: single acting enclosed crankcase

Post by Lionel Connell » Sat Nov 11, 2017 4:29 am

Forgive my math but $0.10-kw/hour x 20Kw output is $2.00 per hour, right? If you spend $10K to set the system up to run reliably and 100% unmanned, it would take 5000 hours of running with zero maintenance cost just to pay off the initial investment even on free fuel and assuming that there is zero degeneration of your plant. To make 20Kw of electricity you will need a boiler, gasifier and burner capable of at least 200kw output because your steam engine/generator will be at best 10% efficient. That would require some truck loads of manure per day to be automatically fed into a gasifier that would need to be completely automatically fed with fuel and cleaned of ash and char and then the waste needs to be disposed of at zero cost. But there will be a cost, because all of this feeding/cleaning system is going to need to be powered by the electricity or mechanical energy that you are making at 10% or less efficiency. I would start by getting a quote to design, build, certify, insure and routinely inspect a 200kw boiler.

I am happy to be corrected on my very rough math, I hope there is a quid in it.

Would there not be more money in bagging the poultry litter and selling it to garden care shops. I know a guy in Australia that bought a mansion and a yacht doing just that.

Cheers

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Re: single acting enclosed crankcase

Post by cyberbadger » Sat Nov 11, 2017 5:08 am

So the big deal with all of that is that it's really almost a full time job for at least one person. Somethings you can automate, but still.. Or maybe that's the really difficult bit to figure out about the problem..

I remember talking to someone who had I believe 2 30kw skinner reciprocating steam engine generator sets, but the really slick thing was he used thermal oil. So the wood burning could bank a lot of energ thermally, and then a heat exchanger to steam consumed the heat as needed to run the generator. That way the guy could shove a huge firebox full of wood and walk a way for an hour or whatever.

-CB
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