“is there another way to create steam without using a fossil fuel that would be feasible?”
Nuclear decay, solar power, geothermal sources.
“For example, using a battery to heat the water to a boil, where the electricity in the battery is created by a large hydro plant, which pumps electricity to the outlet that ultimately charges the bsttery in the vehicle?”
In such a case, why go through the process of boiling the water?
Why use a battery to heat water into steam which then moves the motor which moves the parts when you could just have the battery move the motor which moves the parts? Just skip the water boiling and plug the battery straight into the motor.
I think I understand why bootcamp introduces a lot of drudgery when it comes to weapons. When you think of a piece of technology as a cool toy, you keep trying to find half-thought through excuses to use it. When you think of something as a boring tool, you’re a lot more rational in its use.
I understand your point about hooking the batteries directly to the motor and skipping the heating of the water. I just used it as a quick example of what ii am looking for. A better way to boil the water. Maybe the answer is “there is no better way”.
Solar power seems to be an interesting idea, but I’m not sure how it would work. Could you “enlighten” us? (GUFFAW!). You would need someway to store the solar energy once it was captured, correct? Isn’t this how solar energy works now? The energy is converted and stored in a battery-like thing, to be used later when needed?
Point of interest…Sentinel Waggon Worksbuilt steam-powered trucks and busses (as well as light railroad locomotives and self-propelled railcars) into the early 1960’s. They were somewhat heavy and underpowered, but generally performed well, in Britain and elsewhere in the Commonwealth. Sentinels used a rather unique propulsion system; a watertube boiler (similar to the “flash boiler” used in high-pressure steam cleaners) and a steam motor (so called by the company) with multiple small cylinders in a number of configurations coupled directly to the drive axle(s). An interesting video of one of these beasts in operation can be seenhere.
It takes so much energy to create high-pressure H2 that the energy of the hydrogen itself is almost a byproduct. H2 is a way to convert and store other forms of energy and then deliver and use it cleanly - it’s more the conduit than the fuel, regardless of the end chemistry.
Actually, Heron of Alexandria built a steam engine in the first century AD. Problem was it was seen as a toy and not something that was really useful. After all, slaves were cheap and there was no need for extra motive power. Seems Heron’s aeolipile also may qualify as the first jet engine too.
Sure, but only in the context of having to produce hydrogen from some other source. You can say the exact same thing about ethanol, in that it’s just a way to translate solar power (via plants, fermentation and distillation) into something you can run your car on.
In a sense, all fossil fuels are the same thing, seeing as they’re all ultimately derived from prehistoric biomass.
If there was some source of naturally occuring abiogenic hydrogen, that would certainly be a fuel, and not a energy conduit.
One thing no one has mentioned is ‘power density’. How many horsepower you can fit in a cubic foot. You can fit a 100 HP IC engine in a compact car. You would be hard pressed to fit a 100 HP steam engine and its boiler into that same car, while still leaving room for the driver.
The steam engines powering the Stanley Steamer cars were surprisingly small-two cylinder, of about 280 cu inch displacement. They also needed no transmission or clutch, and no starter was required. The big disadvantage was the long warmup, the need for water, and the complicated startup procedure.
Steam cars did OK up till about 1915, when gasoline engines came out ahead.
True. Steam engines seem to attract a certain segment of people who find them techno-romantic but who really do not have a solid engineering understanding of the problems they present.
No it is not. It is solid engineering. I am not going to get into the same things that have been said many times in previous threads but there is one point I want to address.
No. This gear box thing is repeated over and over in threads like this and it is just not true and shows a lack of understanding of motors.
A steam locomotive has no gear box because it can get by without one only for two reasons:
(1) Acceleration is not important. Have you seen a steam train leave the station? The first full turn of the driving wheels can take 5 to 10 seconds. On level track. It could not even start on a steep incline. No car would be acceptable like that but a train can accelerate very slowly because it will not be stopping for many miles. You could not have a train like that which needed to start and stop frequently. In fact a steam locomotive is just stuck in one gear and you could do exactly the same with an internal combustion engine. The only difference is that an internal combustion engine needs to keep up certain RPM or it stalls. This is what makes people think steam engines can start the vehicle from a standstill and ICE cannot but it is just not so. Put a centrifugal clutch (like the Citroen 2CV) or a hidraulic torque converter and you can start from standstill with an ICE. Stick the car in high gear and you can get the same acceleration you would get with a steam engine. 0-60 in forever. The light will probably be red again before you’ve cleared the intersection. Switcher or shunter locomotives have lower gear ratio but also lower top speed. You can’t have both without a gear box. If you want good torque you will have a very, very low top speed.
Train locomotives are designed either for torque or for speed but not both. This is possible because a different locomotive is used to pull trains in long trips and to move them around the yard. this is just not possible in a private car.
(2) Train tracks have slopes which are nowhere near what roads have. Most of the time they are very close to horizontal and for parts with a higher incline often an additional locomotive was added.
A steam engine which needs to provide good acceleration and which needs to climb steep grades needs a gear box just as much as an ICE needs one and for the same reasons. The fact that an external combustion engine will not stall at low speed has nothing to do with the need for a gearbox. If you have a steam engine powered car without a gear box which can start with reasonable acceleration on a steep incline then the top speed is going to be laughable.
I am not going to discuss all the many drawbacks of steam engines when compared to other types of engines because they have been discussed to death in earlier threads. They just cannot compare.
No. That happens to be what gave better results. Even in stationary engines, marine engines or train locomotives where steam lasted much longer in the end the steam engine was also abandoned because it just could not compete with better engineering solutions.
So it can burn coal. So what? Even the last steam locomotives were burning oil and not solid fuel. Even in stationary and marine applications steam engines have been displaced by turbines, diesels, etc.
It is just not possible today to make a steam car that can compete with modern cars in any significant way. Not even close. And it still needs a gearbox (or variable transmission or whatever).
Anyone who believes a steam engine car can compete today just does not understand the issues. And, believe me, if that were true someone would be doing it. When it comes to making money there is no tradition. If there was any belief that it might be possible you can be sure many companies would be trying to do it. Competition is fierce and they would do anything they could to get ahead.
Steam engines are low tech and can be suited for developing countries where higher tech engines can be difficult to operate and maintain. Other than that they are history, just like the Morse telegraph.
The steam engine has become a viable way to move a vehicle. It’s a mature technology, and has been for a long time. But then the technology for internal combustion engines improved to the point that it was an even better way to move a vehicle than even a mature steam engine, and so steam-powered vehicles are now rare.
Weird. I’m probably missing something. According to Wikipedia and various other sources, the Doble steamer could accelerate from 0-60mph in 15 seconds and had no gearbox or clutch and had a top speed of 90mph. Wiki also reckons modern stripped down versions can go 0-75mph in 10 seconds and have reached 120mph.
Is that all just made up? Because I guess it has to be. Or maybe what was possible a hundred years ago is now impossible as proven by your impeccable post. The possibility that your post actually comprises you talking completely out of your ass is too awful to contemplate.
I too must be missing something. As I recall, Stanley cars held land speed records for a number of years, and only abandoned racing after the death of a driver in a crash. Their records stood for some years afterward, despite repeated attempts to beat them by IC cars. I’ve seen the plaque on Daytona Beach commemorating this achievement.
Also, starting up a train is quite different from starting up an automobile. In a train there is an enormous mass. This is to be accelerated by a couple of steel wheels operating on a steel track. The contact surface is not much bigger than a playing card. Spin that wheel fast and that’s all you’ll do – spin the wheel. Spin it slowly at first and you can get the entire train moving. Cars, in my experience, have rubber tires in contact with pavement. This configuration has a rather higher coefficient of friction than steel on steel.
Also, I seem to dimly recall (but I’ll accept correction) that flash boilers using recirculating freon avoid many of the problems of once-through water boilers. They allow rapid pressurization (so you don’t need to wait half an hour to get system pressure up to operating level), and no need to stop for water tank refills. And external combustion is usually much more “complete” than internal, making the exhaust much closer to just water and carbon dioxide than the brew emanating from the tail pipes of IC cars, even after computer tuning and catalytic converters. Does not solve the carbon dioxide problem, but does mitigate the other pollutants.
Fuel flexibility shouldn’t be underrated either. As long as we are going to continue to burn hydrocarbons anyway (does anybody see IC cars disappearing any time soon?) steam cars could be configured to burn fuels including less expensive fractions of crude petroleum. As I’ve been given to understand, part of the yo-yo volatility of retail gasoline prices has to do with refinery capacity and seasonal demand for specific fractionations. Steam cars could burn pretty much any fraction or combination of fractions, greatly reducing refinery capacity as a critical factor. And running on LPG (seemingly a wave of the short term future anyway) would be a slam dunk for steam cars.
I don’t know about land vehicles, but the Soviets did build some nclear submarines that used liquid metal to transfer the heat (primarily sodium, iirc) and the US at least experimented with liquid metal systems in sub design.
I sure wouldn’t want to see auto accidents that release boiling radioactive caustic metal, however.
The big issue as I see it, is that you have inherent efficiency gains by having the working fluid (i.e. what pushes the piston/spins the turbine) in an internal combustion engine be the combusting fuel source itself.
In essence, you skip a step and a level of complexity vs. steam, where you have to use fuel to vaporize the working fluid, which can then do work. You lose a lot of the energy available to the fuel in doing so to various losses- heating up the boiler itself, the air around it, etc…
That skipping of a step must be somewhat offset by the reduced (or eliminated) need for a transmission. Steam engines have essentially a “flat” power curve - same torque at any RPM, torque being strictly governed by steam pressure (acting on a cylinder(s) of constant size). IC engines have to be kept within their “peak power curve” since they have almost no power at low RPM. That of course is why your manual shift car stalls if you try to start up from a dead stop in high gear. The transmission allows the engine to constantly run between, say, 1,200 and 2,500 RPM regardless of the speed of the vehicle. As was noted earlier in regard to trains, full power/torque is possible at even the slowest speed, so no transmission is needed to keep the engine itself running at anything faster than wheel speed. (In the train, the engine is just cylinders attached to the drive wheels. In cars, it is usually reciprocating pistons in a ‘block’, superficially similar to an IC block.)
I’m not an engineer, and I really cannot debate the relative efficiencies of steam versus IC. But it seems that steam has a number of advantages that might, especially in our changing world, outweigh some disadvantage in theoretical efficiency. Lighter vehicles (no or smaller transmission, lighter engines) and fuel adaptability (I can envision a simple swap-out unit to convert a liquid fuel burner, like for kerosene, into a gas burner for LPG as something a shade tree mechanic could do him/herself, or have done at a garage, for minimal cost and allowing switching to/from cheaper or more easily available local fuels, for instance.)
I don’t see steam vehicles as the best possible future, but I can imagine them as part of a bridge technology between what we have now and perhaps total electric vehicles powered by nuclear power plants. Clean fusion if we are lucky in getting some development breakthroughs, or just fission if that’s what technology provides.
No, there’s a difference between fuels that have an energy density near that of gasoline, which is at or near the cost of the energy needed to put that gallon of gas in the car.
The equation for H2 is so out of whack that the energy value of the H2 almost disappears into the noise fringe. The energy to produce H2 and compressing it to any useful density is many, many multiples of ergs of the energy it contains in the end.
I’m not knocking H2; over the years I have found it’s more productive to talk of it as a conduit or carrier than a fuel, much as we do about batteries. Trying to compare H2 to gas as fuels makes a wildly out of balance argument.
