Heat Engines

[vteco]

Cleaning up boiler exhaust in a solid fueled boiler is easier in a stationary application than a vehicle.

In a stationary application, all of the most recent technologies applied to woodstoves could be applied to boilers. Presently, fluidized bed, heated secondary air injection, and catalytic converters are a few of the means used.

Some smoke remediation may be light enough and small enough to apply to vehicles, but I'm no expert on that, and my own interest, again is in small boats, rather than roadable vehicles.

It is possible top burn woody fuels cleanly on a very small scale (like the tiny boat motor I'm interested in). There are many portable solid fueled camp stoves that use secondary air injection to produce blue flame combustion, which is generally evidence of a clean complete burn. Boiling water (for tea or soup) is typical usage.

The generally regarded past epitome of sophistication in steam powered autos was the Doble steam car. I'm not a steam car person, so I don't really have a stand on it, or the experience to address that specialized area of engineering.

The book Experimetal Flash Steam does talk a little about Ford's more recent experiments with steam.

Flash steam generally refers to flash boilers, also known as monotube boilers, which are essentially coils of tubing (like on-demand water heaters) as opposed to the old traditional tank, or tank and tube stye boilers, of which there are very many sub-varieties.

One oft quoted advantage of monotube boilers is the low volume of contained superheated water, and so, relative low impact of a rupture, compared to a conventional steam boiler explosion.

Amateur re-purposing of alternative pressure tanks into tank type boilers is inherently risky. You see a lot of that on YouTube. There are a great number of unacknowledged dangers in using these tanks for steam. I don't actually want to get into a discussion about them.

To anyone reading this and now interested, please don't do what you see there unless you fully understand the long term metalurgical and chemical qualities of steam generation, fatigue resistance of tanks, and the horrific effects of steam boiler explosion, or how to perform hydraulic boiler testing, and many other subjects, I'm probably neglecting to mention. Tank re-purposing isn't a place for estimation, or try it and see.

The collector around my flash engine was not the muffler, just a manifold. A tuned muffler would be separate.