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
(20.) We have seen that about 1000 degrees of heat must be
communicated to any given quantity of water at 212°, in order to
convert it into steam of the same temperature, and possessing a
pressure amounting to about 15 pounds on the square inch, and that
such steam will occupy above 1700 times the bulk of the water from
which it was raised. Now we might anticipate, that by abstracting the
heat thus employed in converting the liquid into vapour, a series of
changes would be produced exactly the reverse of those already
described; and such is found to be actually the case. Let us suppose a
vessel, the capacity of which is 1728 cubic inches, to be filled with
steam, of the temperature of 212°, and exerting a pressure of 15
pounds on the square inch; let 5-1/2 cubic inches of water, at the
temperature of 32°, be injected into this vessel, immediately the
steam will impart the heat, which it has absorbed in the process of
vaporisation to the water thus injected, and will itself resume the
liquid form. It will shrink into its primitive dimensions of one cubic
inch, and the heat which it will dismiss will be sufficient to raise
the 5-1/2 cubic inches of injected water to the temperature of 212°.
The contents of the vessel will thus be 6-1/2 cubic inches of water at
the temperature of 212°. One of these cubic inches is in fact the
steam which previously filled the vessel reconverted into water, the
other 5-1/2 are the injected water which has been raised from the
temperature of 32° to 212° by the heat which has been dismissed by the
steam in resuming the liquid state. It will be observed that in this
transmission no temperature is lost, since the cubic inch of water
into which the steam is converted has the same temperature as the
steam had before the cold water was injected.
These consequences are in perfect accordance with the results already
obtained from observing the time necessary to convert a given quantity
of water into steam by the application of heat. From the present
result it follows, that in the reduction of a given quantity of steam
to water it parts with as much heat as is sufficient to raise 5-1/2
cubic inches from 32° to 212°, that is, 5-1/2 times 180° or 990°.
(21.) There is an effect produced in this process to which it is
material that we should attend. The steam which filled the space of
1728 cubic inches shrinks when reconverted into water into the
dimensions of 1 cubic inch. It therefore leaves 1727 cubic inches of
the vessel it contains unoccupied. By this property steam is rendered
instrumental in the formation of a vacuum.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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