Steam powered cycle Burner problems

Interesting problem. I understand your wish to go for safety, however can I suggest you go back to basics. You dont need to ride the bike to test it, it would be worth building a test rig to support ther bike with a contact wheel on the tyre turning a fan to simulate the riding/ traction load. then build the burner as per the original design using gasoline. Then run it under load on propane as your base line, then run it on gasoline to see wether it does what its supposed to do. If you get a towering inferno you can have an extinwisher handy. ;let us know how you get on. ted In dorset Uk.

It may be that your boiler just has too little surface area. There were more than one steam locomotives built that earned the name "poor steamer".

The other thing is that storing steam will not help. You really want to get the live steam into the engine as quickly and as hot as possible. You might even want to try a superheater.

Apologies for coming back so soon, forgot to mention something important. Now both you and i know that propane has a high calorific value, but it also has a serious disadvantage, That is its flame rate is very much slower than say acetylene or gasoline. this is best illustrated by thefact that you can weld with acetylene and oxygen but you cant weld with propane and oxygen. thesame limitation applies to mappgas and butane. The reason the flame started to burn insideof the tube is its slow flame rate. What counts with these gas mixtures is the BTU's per second you can generate. If you tried propane and oxygen it would be much better. acetylene and oxygen as per a cutting torch, youll find youll probably have too much steam!!. hope this helps. Ted.

--I remember Vesivius! Have seen a couple of 'em. Yagotta get the gasoline burner working or you won't have enough BTUs to make it work. That's because the boiler's not the greatest design in the world: VFT yes? Two ideas: build a flash boiler instead and maybe make a spinning cup burner. For more info on that contact the guys at SACA West in So Calif; they've worked on these burners for some time; maybe it's possible to build one small enough for your application? Dunno.

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There are any number of books telling how to relate boiler surface area, efficiency and amount of steam per unit time. You probably don't have enough surface area or it isn't used efficiently. Back issues of The Model Engineer would have some of the answers, much of the modeling that was done was small locomotives, boats and traction engines. There were any number of articles on building efficient small boilers. I have a small Brit book on flash steam for models, probably 25 years old now, might still be in print, though. That might be a way to get enough surface area to run your engine.

As far as choice of fuels, propane is roughly equal to gasoline/ kerosene/diesel in heat content per unit weight. Burning characteristics are something else, though.

Are you piping the exhaust steam up the stack to get a better draft, ala locomotive?

Stan