The Steam Engine Familiarly Explained and Illustrated: With an historical sketch of its invention and progressive improvement; its applications to navigation and railways; with plain axioms for railway speculatorsLardner, Dionysius
History
The Steam Engine Familiarly Explained and Illustrated: With an historical sketch of its invention and progressive improvement; its applications to navigation and railways; with plain axioms for railway speculators
Lardner, Dionysius
Steam-engines -- Early works to 1850
Several methods suggest themselves to increase the surface of water in
contact with a given quantity of air passing through it. This would be
accomplished by causing the air to pass between plates placed near
each other, so as to divide the current into thin strata, having
between them strata of water, or it might be made to pass between
tubes differing slightly in diameter, the water passing through an
inner tube, and being also in contact with the external surface of the
outer tube. Such a method would be similar in principle to the
steam-jacket used in _Watt's_ steam engines, or to the condenser of
_Cartwright's_ engine already described. But, considering the facility
of constructing small tubes, and of placing them in the boiler, that
method, perhaps, is, on the whole, the best in practice; although the
shape of a tube, geometrically considered, is most unfavourable for
the exposure of a fluid contained in it to its surface. The air which
passes from the fire-chamber, being subdivided as it passes through
the boiler by a great number of very small tubes, may be made to
impart all its excess of heat to the water before it issues into the
chimney. This is all which the most refined contrivance can effect.
The Rocket engine was traversed by 25 tubes, each 3 inches in
diameter; and the principle has since been carried to a much greater
extent.
The abstraction of a great quantity of heat from the air before it
reaches the chimney is attended with one consequence, which, at first
view, would present a difficulty apparently insurmountable; the
chimney would, in fact, lose its power of draught. This difficulty,
however, was removed by using the waste steam, which had passed from
the cylinder after working the engine, for the purpose of producing a
draught. This steam was urged through a jet presented upwards in the
chimney, and driven out with such force in that direction as to create
a sufficient draught to work the furnace.
It will be observed that the principle of draught in the Novelty is
totally distinct from this: in that engine the draught is produced by
a bellows worked by the engine. The question, as far as relates to
these two methods, is, whether more power is lost in supplying the
steam through the jet, as in the Rocket, or in working the bellows, as
in the Novelty. The force requisite to impel the steam through the jet
must be exerted by the returning stroke of the piston, and,
consequently, must rob the working effect to an equivalent amount. On
the other hand, the power requisite to work the bellows in the Novelty
must be subducted from the available power of the engine. The former
method is found to be the more effectual and economical.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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