Are we missing a link?

This might help

Edited By JasonB on 26/05/2023 12:24:05

What I do not understand is how countless numbers of prior engineers failed to invent a dry firebox and a miniature heat exchanger and then prove it is the best thing ever. Or am I just a cynical old fart?

Martin

Ummm, one hates to put a damper, so to speak on one's endeavours but has one really come up with owt new behind all that middle-management-ese?

The Leader's failings were more to do with its layout and axle-weight than boiler and engine design.

Duncan's point about unbounded optimism reminds me of a book by the 19C Scots historian Charles Mackay. "Extraordinary Popular Delusions…. " tells of many mass-delusional schemes and ideas, with such parallels to us as the "dot-com bubble", but his chapter on Alchemy highlights the power of optimism over realism, or reality.

He recounts how one disillusioned alchemist remarked after a symposium, on how many "If only… " excuses he had heard, to excuse the fundamentally flawed anyway: "If only… I'd heated it for longer / my retort had not cracked, / " etc.

And so it is with all the assorted steam and i.c. engine ideas that have appeared and disappeared over the last few decades; often suggesting a rather weak understanding of basic physics, repeating older ideas or merely complicating the simple. The aim has moved somewhat, from simply greater efficiency ( a Law of Diminishing Returns) to now, Greater Green-ness; but the literal sense of the Americanism "Zero-carbon" is rather "green" itself.

The implication here, complete with the photograph of men operating what looks like a conventional portable-engine, is that the fuel would be cropped or salvaged wood: needing land to grow the trees. So nothing new there: be it wood, straw, or sugar-cane stalks.

Back in the 1980s, I think it was, the agricultural institute at Reading had already solved this circle, by looking into what fast-growing trees to coppice for making gas that would fuel not a steam-engine, but the intrinsically far more efficient internal-combustion engine – simply a slightly modified car unit – to drive an alternator. (Or I suppose, other machines.)

Although the Reading paper I have was about the trees so does not go further into the engineering, distilling wood has other potentially useful derivatives, as with coal; and the charcoal itself may be a source of producer-gas (carbon-monoxide), as a further fuel-gas.

Perhaps it's new because it's half dry and half wet firebox if the side stays are anything to go by.

And why is releasing 20 years of locked up carbon a green idea

Edited By Dave Halford on 26/05/2023 17:39:49

The guy making the big pitch about his magic boiler is a snake oil salesman, plain and simple. I have watched his occasional pitch videos since 2016. The latest iteration is planning a rubber tired wood or organic by-product burning steam tractor to replace diesels. We'll see how many customers like the idea of costly maintenance specific to steam equipment – maintenance of the boiler and pumps, government mandated regular hydrostatic and ultrasonic tests, the need to employ pressure vessel technicians to do the work, and the labour to handle the fuel and stoke it in use. Gee, this all sounds like the reasons diesel and petrol powered farm, railway and commercial equipment replaced steam eventually, on farms and roads and rails.

I'm a major fan of preserved steam and model steam machines of all kinds, but the magic boiler guy is fooling himself (and maybe investors) that this could be a commercial success and would displace diesels, while cleaning up the planet, etc. Just my opinion.

Some time ago, around 2014, was a guy in Morrinsville , Waikato, NZ, was working on a very high temp burning wood burner, that used water vapour tubes, to transfer the heat from the fire to create steam. One thing about the system, that the exhaust was only around 10 to 15 deg above ambient, and the system recovered as much energy as possible. It did not make a boiler of hot water steam, but only turned the water needed to be steam as it ran through what I imagine as being a flash boiler arrangement. I only saw part of the system, and never got to see the whole thing in it entirety. He did say, that it could never over heat and explode like conventional steam boilers. He also said that instead of making steam, it could be used to make hot water for a home heating system, and the water would never get above 50c , aiming at the retirement home heating market, he thought.

The most interesting aspect I saw of the part they were testing, was the wood went in down a chute, and you could not see the fire at all.

Snake oil was always too expensive.

More of a steam generator than a boiler. Which means it has no reserve supply of steam when coming to a hill or varying load for other reasons. Not sure if the wood fire would be responsive enough to keep up the pressure under varying conditions?

And nobody can convince me that cutting down trees and burning them to create steam is somehow green. If we all converted to that, the planet would be treeless within a very short time.

But it looks like he is having a lot of fun and certainly putting some effort into it.

could not watch all the video." corporate cow poo" we get it all the time at work .good fun to point out to young managers "that's not new we tried that years ago"