Long meandering siloloquy about burning drift wood.

[Lopez Mike]

Very good thoughts. As I said, I'll get it all sorted out in a simple configuration (to suit my simple comprehension!) before I put any effort into complications.

Both of those cars we expensive performance vehicles. I suspect that a wrecking yard would want big bucks for anythings off of them (grin).

Mike

[87gn@tahoe]

Guys upgrade the turbos on those cars all of the time and sell the originals for cheap. One of my friends has a Stealth R/T, I will let you know when he upgrades...

[Lopez Mike]

This Wes is just bound to get me in trouble if he can.
m

[fredrosse]

Mike, the weed burner in the sidewheeler is shown on the first post about "Laying Up the Steam Plant" in "Engines & Boilers" The blue handle has a lever to give full fire (way too much for my boiler), and a small propane needle valve to regulate the flame from almost nothing to full fire. I bent the burner tube (about 3/8 OD steel tubing) into an "S" shape for mounting near the tangential entrance pipe to the furnace. There is no regulator, the burner needle valve gets full propane pressure.

With continuous steaming at a fairly high fire, the propane tank gets cold and pressure drops off. I can switch to another propane tank when this happens, or open up the valve more. I have 3 sockets for 20 pound propane tanks on the boat.

[Lopez Mike]

Aha! I didn't read that original post carefully. A weed burner. I have one of those beasts hanging on my wall. It would be trivial to make up a spare firebox door for my Beckman VFT-30 and aim the blast in as you did. And that would put the flame right up against the water leg where it will do the most good rather than aiming it up the flues and out the stack.

Thanks,
Mike

[barts]

While for our small 19' launch fuel economy is just a fun engineering exercise, for our proposed longer term project it is a different matter.

We're also headed for Lopez Island long term (we've owned land there for nearly 30 years), and want to build a larger boat (34' or so) to enjoy a larger cruising area and be able to steam in more weather conditions. One trip we'd really like to do is to head up the Inland Passage towards Alaska... and this will take an efficient boat, if such a term can be used with a steam plant. I'd like to be able to burn mostly wood; the entire area is heavily forested and being able to travel without burning diesel all the time is attractive indeed. However, wood is a less efficient fuel than diesel;
dry wood is good for about 8000 BTU/lb, while diesel is good for 20000 BTU/lb. On a volume basis, wood comes out even worse, with a cubic foot of diesel good for about a million BTU, and Douglas fir providing about a quarter of that. The heating value of the hydrogen in oil is pretty compelling! At 1 gph we can likely get 5 mpg; 50 gallons of fuel would take us 250 miles; fuel costs are probably about $1/mile buying marine diesel, less if we add more tankage and go with home heating oil. If we try to go fast, we'll burn three times that much - but haste makes waste, here.

We'd need to carry a lot of wood to match that, and we can fit the fuel in places where the wood just won't go.

I guess it makes sense to design the tankage to handle somewhat thicker oil, too (steam heat?) ... .and still be able to fire up on wood, of course.
Waste oil is always an option, too.... with a steam atomizing burner, we'll need a evaporator to provide additional water. Short distances are quite possible with wood - but oil will be pretty attractive so long as we can get it...

- Bart

[87gn@tahoe]

Bart,

What about a main engine-mounted compressor to air atomize waste motor oil? Or a disel injection pump for common rail disels (no pulses, just a solid flow of 1000's of psi) to pressure atomize the oil?

[dhic001]

Bart,

What about a main engine-mounted compressor to air atomize waste motor oil? Or a disel injection pump for common rail disels (no pulses, just a solid flow of 1000's of psi) to pressure atomize the oil?

Why use air or a pump when you can use steam to do the same job, and heat the oil at the same time? All the bits of the low pressure steam atomising burner are in the car ready to start assembling into Zeltic, so I'll be able to report on how well it goes in a few weeks. While the burner would burn waste oil, diesel etc, the plan is to run waste cooking oil as its easy to get and much cleaner than waste oil. The additives and heavy metals in waste engine oil makes it fairly nasty stuff.

Am anticipating a burn rate of up to 4-5 litres per hour to maintain full speed. Greenbank, the 36 foot steamlaunch with a large (3 1/2 + 3 1/2 * 5) twin simple burns about 11 litres per hour in its twin burners. The oil is slightly heated then burn in the burner which runs at less than 5 psi. The result is just the hiss of the burner, little smoke and the resulting little soot, not too bad to live with.

Rather than relying on a dodgy supply of wood, I'd be finding a good source of good coal or a source of cooking oil.

Daniel

[barts]

Bart,

What about a main engine-mounted compressor to air atomize waste motor oil? Or a disel injection pump for common rail disels (no pulses, just a solid flow of 1000's of psi) to pressure atomize the oil?

Well, the compressor would suck a lot of power, so I'll skip that... we don't need thousands of psi for direct oil spraying; a few hundred is more than enough from what I got talking to the guys on the Jeremiah O'Brien. The nozzle is tricky, and requires close tolerances to get a nice spray pattern; if one uses waste oil they get beat up more quickly. A steam operated pump is what most ships use for that service, but a small gear pump would work well here. Oil burner pumps work in this service.

One of the advantages of using a steam atomizing burner is that they create a substantial draft.

=- Bart

[87gn@tahoe]

I believe the distances Bart plans on steaming is in the hundreds of miles.... Fresh water will be hard to come by to make up what is lost by steam atomizing, unless he makes it using an evaporator as he suggested.

I was just suggesting an alternative that may allow for more room for fuel, etc. One would need to figure out if the added fuel consumption from running a compressor would be less than the added fuel storage capacity. A high pressure injection pump would probably be the best way to go; it could be regulated to the desired pressure, no water loss, and little HP used to run. If one were to make a burner setup similar to the one pictured below, the benefit of steam heating the oil would be a moot point.



Waste oil can be found anywhere there's an automotive or boat mechanic, and it's free. It has a lot more BTUs than wood, gasoline, vegetable oil, or disel. One can easily use a centrifuge to remove any sludge or heavy metals. I am centrifuging free oil to supplement the fuel in my '92 Dodge truck.

But wood smells a lot nicer and is a lot quieter. GOOD steam coal is very hard to find here in the US..

Just depends on how far you want to go.