Signal Boost: The Cloud Factory · 1:44am Nov 6th, 2020
Another wild Not-A-Contest story appears!
Mica has graced us with a story about a pegasus and a steam factory.
If you like pegasuses or technology or ponies on Earth, you should read it.
I know a thing or two about steam plants; lots of things are heated with steam, after all. Trains used to be heated with steam; they had lots because that’s what they ran on. Yards would have steam plants to keep locomotives warmed up and ready to go (sorta like a block heater for a train) and to keep the passenger coaches warm when they weren’t coupled to a locomotive. In fact, steam heat stayed in passenger cars well into the Amtrak era; I’m not sure when they finally stopped. The SDP40Fs had steam heaters; I don’t know if the F40s (which replaced them) ever did.
For buildings, it’s the same principle. Put a big boiler somewhere, and run hot water or steam to radiators. Really smart design puts those tunnels under sidewalks; not only does that make them easier to access if need be, but the radiant heat from the steam pipes melts snow and ice that would otherwise gather on the sidewalks.
Steam tunnels are cool, too, although I don’t think a pegasus would enjoy them. Too claustrophobic.
Also, protip, while the pipe’s insulated, the bolted flanges aren’t, and they’re very hot. Um, I’ve heard.
Also, a lot of power plants sell their unwanted steam, or otherwise use it--a lot of places, you can’t just dump hot water into a lake or river, you’ve got to cool it down first. If you can cool it down by selling it to someone else, or if you can make a deal with the local city to have the downtown streets steam-heated, you don’t have to build cooling towers or other expensive infrastructure to get that cooling.
Steam, especially high pressure steam, can also be very dangerous, a common practice on ships powered by steam was to have a broom with the straw end painted to find holes on gaps as the steam going through those pipes could and would strip the flesh off of your hand.
Also, though this vid is on naval boilers, the tech is the same, or at least similar, to that used on land.
5392923
What about heat exchange to preheat the incoming cold water with exhaust hot steam?
Thanks. :)
"I’m not sure when they finally stopped"
Let's see, according to Wikipedia, at least...
(Of course, that's just in the United States.)
And steam heating (and a variety of other steam things) is (are) neat, aye. :)
(A while back I read a number of interesting posts from Dan Holohan on steam heating (among other things); if that doesn't sound familiar, you might want to look him up.)
5392923
>>Also, a lot of power plants sell their unwanted steam
Isn't it considered communist practice now?
In Iceland they do something similar, but it's with natural geothermal water.
5392927
Oh yeah, totally. High pressure anything can be dangerous when it leaks (we’ve had warnings on the high pressure diesel used in modern common-rail diesels these days; if you screw up, you can get yourself a subcutaneous injection of diesel fuel which is not good). The big difference with steam is that it also cooks you.
Yeah, the general idea is pretty much the same. Biggest difference in naval boiler design, I’d assume, is that they can’t just stick a pipe overboard and suck in more water, not unless they’ve got a way to purify it before it goes into the boiler (or at least filter and desalinate it).
5393067
I’m sure they do that, too--I don’t know the whole process, but I’d guess that you can only practically get the used steam down to a certain temperature with pre-heaters, and that you’re still going to have to dump some of it off, or else nobody would build cooling towers.
5393137
Huh, I should have gone that route in my quick WIkipedia glance :P I focused on the locomotive articles instead.
Yeah--I’d imagine that the longer a nation ran steam locomotives, the longer the steam heat tech would hold out. After all, if you’ve got lots of steam to available, why would you use a different method for heat?
IIRC, the Duluth, Missabe, and Iron Range RR used heavy steam locomotives into the 60s both because used steam locomotives were cheap, and because they used the steam to thaw the frozen ore so they could unload the cars.
It is.
I’ve never heard of him, so I’ll have to check him out.
5393267
What, selling steam? I wouldn’t think so, I’d think that’s capitalization at its finest. Selling something you don’t want to increase your profits. Right up there with Henry Ford starting the Kingsford Charcoal Company to sell his unwanted charcoal.
5393558
Yeah, which is great when you have it. Aren’t pretty much all of Iceland’s power plants geothermal, as well?
<checks Wikipedia>
Huh, only 26% of their power is geothermal. Although clicking through, another Wikipedia article says that 80% of their power is hydroelectric.
5393637
very true with that last part. Desalination plants just can’t be made effective enough and small enough for use on ships to continuously feed the boilers fresh non recycled water.
5393640
Well you see, that's "simple" microeconomics capitalism, where you assume most things are perfect. Once you account for things like competition, market types, nature of goods etc, you get a situation where companies intentionally destroy unused raw materials to avoid devaluing their signature products.
5393642
That stuff can vary day by day.
5393639
Heh, no problem. And understandable, since HEP rolling stock is usually paired with an HEP locomotive... but, on the other hand, on a system in transition, it may be easier to just take an old car shell and turn it into a power car than get an HEP-equipped locomotive right away. And I don't know whether it was actually done or not, but I don't see why, if the locomotives came in first, one couldn't stick a steam generator in a car shell to run steam-heated (and potentially air conditioned) cars behind a locomotive without one; one might even make it an electric steam generator run off the locomotive's HEP.
Well, it has some disadvantages (I recall, for instance, that apparently soon after Amtrak began converting there was some extremely cold weather in which the steam-heated stock's steam lines froze and the HEP stock kept working), but aye, it has a lot more of them with an electric (of whatever electricity source) locomotive. I recall reading that, on the pre-HEP passenger diesels, the steam generators were some of the least reliable parts, and of course they required their own water tanks which would be used up and have to be refilled, while a diesel-electric locomotive builder is obviously already working with machinery to generate electricity onboard and many of the locomotive's systems are already geared around that. Whereas, with a steam locomotive, enough electrical capacity for a passenger train (rather than just some dynamos for the locomotive's own limited needs) would require a completely separate system (which was done on a few occasions historically, as I recall coming up in an earlier comment exchange with you), but there's already a great big steam boiler that basically just wants an extra valve and some piping to supply steam down the train.
Oh, neat. :)
:)
Oh! Well, glad I mentioned him, then, and I hope you enjoy. :)
5393637
"not unless they’ve got a way to purify it before it goes into the boiler (or at least filter and desalinate it)"
Also, I believe high pressure boilers prefer to run with distilled water (thin boiler tubes are needed due to wall thickness/cross section issues, as I recall, but that also means they're more easily blocked with scale... which is very bad at those pressures and temperatures), which in turn means the system's better run with condensers, which are a lot harder to fit on a loading-gauge-constrained locomotive than a ship (that also has a giant mass of water to dump the heat to).
(Though that extra and less constrained space is I'd say also a major difference in design, and quite possibly a bigger one.)
5393700
It’s something I’ve never really thought all that much about, especially living on the Great Lakes where the steam ships did have access to an ample supply of fresh water. I think that there are still some steam-powered ships in the Great Lakes Fleet, and I think that the ferry from Michigan to Wisconsin is also still a steamer.
5393720
Sure, in some cases I could see that, but in the case of a power plant, for example, the steam is excess, has to be cooled to meet regulations, and so selling it (or giving it away) in either case is the cheaper option.
I don’t know if they’re still doing it, but when I lived in Lafayette, Wabash Trailers was selling damaged or scrap pieces of Duraplate to anybody who wanted to buy it for whatever.
5394382
That’s true. I also didn’t check if one of the percentages was number of plants, and another was power output.
5405778
They can’t use the water from the Great Lakes either, to many particles that can make clogs. But the Great Lakes are relatively small so steam ships can easily traverse the lakes without much issue.
5395119
I don’t know offhand if it was done or not, but I do know that Amtrak converted old F40s into cab cars/baggage cars (stripped out the running gear, but kept the cabs intact) while they were transitioning to newer locomotives . . . I vaguely remember when they had the subway-style cab cars for pushing operations; I think that they retired those in Michigan in the 90s, but not entirely sure. And they might have moved somewhere else. According to one source, during the transition they did convert some E8s and old baggage cars into HEP cars, but I haven’t yet found any more information about that program.
Yeah, I think that with the end of steam locomotives steam heat was going to go away, but since practically nobody was investing in passenger fleets in the US, it made more economic sense to toss boilers on some diesel locomotives rather than replace all the passenger cars. I’m sure the electric heat systems had been around for some years, since it wouldn’t make sense for an electrified railroad to have steam heaters, at least presuming that they bought all their equipment with the intention of using it on an electrified line . . . although since most railroads weren’t fully electrified, the argument could be made that buying passenger cars all with steam heat and fitting steam generators into GG1s or a steam-heating car that they towed behind them (baggage car, RPO, or whatever) did make economic sense, since that way the cars could go anywhere on the railroad as needed, rather than be confined to the Northeast Corridor.
But then there’s commuter lines like the South Shore which as far as I know was always--or nearly always--electrified along its entire route. Surely they would have used electric heat . . .
I honestly don’t know. I don’t know all that much about actual historical (or even modern) passenger operations.
Ideally, not just distilled, but with certain chemicals added to it to prevent corrosion, etc. I don’t remember exactly what, but came across a NTSB report on a shipboard boiler explosion where one of the problems was that they weren’t properly dosing the boiler water. I would guess (but it’s only a guess) that locomotive boilers tended to be more heavily constructed, due to the type of shock loads they got that a ship probably wouldn’t.
5405783
Couldn’t you filter it, though? I mean, that’s way easier than desalinating it.
5405786
Okay, so the water you get from lakes, rivers, oceans, and the like is called hard water, the water that goes through boilers is soft water, soft water has been purified and has had all particulate matter removed from the water so that when you boil it in the boiler you don’t build up material deposits that you have to clean out and that can cause the pipes to melt.
You have to realize that the people who run boilers don’t want to risk having to replace parts so they only use soft water occasionally topped up with hard water.
See the naval boilers video at about 17 minutes in.
5405789
I did know that that was a problem in some places for steam locomotives, and I don’t know what all their solutions were. I suspect that older boilers especially often got lower-quality water and presumably had to be cleaned more frequently. Could be another tradeoff, where on a ship it’s practical to carry a lot of good water for the boiler and condense and reuse it, whereas on a locomotive that isn’t terribly practical, I’m not sure. I have very limited knowledge of the nuts and bolts of boiler operation.
Well, the sensible people do. I read a NTSB report on a boiler explosion on a ship where one of the things they cited was the crew not keeping the water balanced with the right additives. That wasn’t the cause of the explosion; IIRC that was the one where they were heat-cycling the boilers too fast to save money . . . I really ought to look that one up again, it’s a good primer on what not to do with a boiler.
5405797
There are a lot of things that shouldn’t be done with boilers.
Poking holes in them with high speed chunks of metal sometimes filled with explosives is near the to of that list.
5405801
From NTSB reports, I’ve also learned operating them with a siezed sliding shoe is bad, and a twelve-foot weld with copper tossed in as a filler is not a good repair.
5405808
Basically doing anything that can weaken it or put a hole in it or cause to much pressure or cause it to explode is something that you don’t do with boilers. Same thing with boats really.
5405785
Nah, unless I'm much mistaken, by the time they were replacing the F40s, their fleet was all-HEP.
As for "subway-style cab cars", I'm not sure what you mean by that? And am curious. :)
Interesting. Do you know when that E8 and baggage car conversion was done? Are you talking about the previous transition, to HEP in the first place, now? Or was this also when the F40s were being phased out? The context is confusing me a bit on that point, sorry. And I'm afraid I'm not pulling details of this off the top of my head or the brief bit of research I had time for.
"Yeah, I think that with the end of steam locomotives steam heat was going to go away, but since practically nobody was investing in passenger fleets in the US, it made more economic sense to toss boilers on some diesel locomotives rather than replace all the passenger cars."
Aye, and there's also the question of what standard to use, I imagine. Steam, in addition to already being established, is relatively easy there: steam is steam, and basically all you had to do was make sure the pressure was in the right range. Every builder of locomotives and cars would work with that. Electricity? Well, what frequency is to be used? What voltage? Single phase, or three phase? What connector design?
Early on electrical infrastructure in general was, as I understand it, much less standardized, and later on, the companies were even less interested in investing in that sort of massive fleet replacement/modification and infrastructure change.
And yes, indeed, as far as I know the GG1s did indeed have steam generators (oil fired, even, according to Wikipedia), and were never converted for HEP. Leading to the somewhat funny situation of an electric locomotive with an unused oil-fired steam generator pulling a diesel-powered generator car to supply the train.
I don't know about the reverse, though, fully-electric lines. But I'd guess you're right, there; it does make sense. Especially on multiple units, which the PRR at least was running as early as [checks] 1908, at least according to Wikipedia.
"I honestly don’t know. I don’t know all that much about actual historical (or even modern) passenger operations."
I know significantly more than you, it sounds like, but I still know there's a lot I don't know, aye!
re feedwater treatment:
Right, I don't recall the details either, but something like that.
As for heavier construction, I'm not sure either, but again we're (mostly) comparing relatively-low-pressure fire-tube locomotive boilers with water-tube marine boilers, the latter of which will often also be significantly larger, I think. So I think it's more complicated than just heavier construction.
(Though I believe I recall that those shock loads, in comparison to the marine environment, were indeed cited as one of the reasons why steam turbine locomotives were never very successful.)
5405797
"I suspect that older boilers especially often got lower-quality water and presumably had to be cleaned more frequently."
Aye, steam locomotive boilers required a lot of cleaning, though in the very late days there were experiments with various feedwater treatment methods to reduce this. This was also another big reason why the fire-tube boiler predominated in locomotives: it was much easier to clear the scale, and the scale presented less risk of a catastrophic failure.
"Could be another tradeoff, where on a ship it’s practical to carry a lot of good water for the boiler and condense and reuse it, whereas on a locomotive that isn’t terribly practical, I’m not sure."
Right; not many condensing locomotives were built, because space is tight, the condenser would have to be air-cooled, meaning it needs to be even bigger, and most locomotives would be making pretty frequent stops anyway (and any service important and valuable enough to be run non-stop was presumably also worth installing track pans for). On a ship, you might have much less access to new boiler water, but you have a lot more space and a lot of surrounding water to dump your waste heat to.