Rather OT - wood burning gas turbine

Interesting, and hardly OT I would have thought. Reminds me - did you ever get your turbo based gas turbine going?

Turbo charger based gas turbine? Currently standing on its end at the bottom of the workshop, its nose pushed out of joint by other projects that have taken my attention. I was stumped by not being able to spool it up to ignition speed and am still looking for a smallish high speed electric motor. A leaf blower just don't hack it and although it is rigged for an air line, I don't have one rigged up and it wouldn't be a lot of use on a rally field, anyway.

Regards,

J. Kim Siddorn,

Far from the first. Lots of the 1930's gas turbines were fuelled with odd mixtures like wood, producer gas, coal dust, heavy oil emulsions etc.

What speed and torque do you need Kim?

Even earlier in fact.

See "The Gas Turbine", Hanz Holzwarth, published 1912 translated by A P Chalkley, Charles Griffin.

Also by the same publisher in the same period (advertised inside the front cover) "The Gas Turbine" Henry Harrison Suplee.

Peter

Anyone told Frank? Jack in Oz ============

Sir Frank was making jets rather than shaft driven stuff that these books refer to, and a lot of them were pretty crude (and dammed heavy!)

Peter

-- Peter A Forbes Prepair Ltd, Luton, UK snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk

Yes - the first English patent for a gas turbine was in 1791 ! This used a reciprocating compressor and probably wouldn't have worked. Another early attempt (the first with a turbo-compressor) was in 1872. It was built and ran, but didn't generate a useful output. Around

1895 - 1905 several steam turbine makers (Curtis in the USA, Rateau / SCA Turbomoteurs in Frnace) tried to build large static turbines with axial compressors and oil burners.

If you can, try and find "The Modern Gas Turbine", by Tom Sawyer, 1945 This isn't the best book on gas turbines in general, but it has the best coverage I've seen on the pre-war ones. It's interesting how it makes almost no distinction between turbo-supercharged diesels and "pure" gas turbines as we know them today.

Early industrial gas turbines were used to power blower fans in blast furnaces and oil plants. Process gas could be used as either a pre-heated air inlet, or even a fuel source. Betweeen 1909 and the

1920's various experimental plants were used in the Thyssen company's blast furnaces, including some powered by pulverised coal dust. The first in America appeared in 1936, an electrical generator of 4MW, using waste gas from a Pennsylvania oil refinery.

In the 1930's, the gas turbine was an obvious idea for theoretical thermodynamics, and the rest was just engineering. The steam turbine was already well established and the turbo-supercharger was becoming viable as its metallurgy problems were solved. Leaders at the time were Brown Boveri of Switzerland, and also Sulzer. They'd built the Rateau turbine of 1905, the Thyssen turbine of 1928 and in 1939 built a bomb-proof gas turbine electricity powerstation of 4MW at Neuchatel. In 1941, during the war itself, they also built their famous 2000hp gas turbine railway locomotive.

All these gas turbine plants were crude though. They were big, heavy and had low outputs, let alone power to weight ratios. Their huge rotating mass made control simpler, as they were effectively self-governing by mere windage losses. Whittle didn't invent the gas turbine, he was the guy who saw that they could also be made lightweight and suitable for aircraft. he had no problem at all in making one, and making it work - his problems started when he needed to stop it either running away, or overheating.

Another interesting little book on early gast turbines is C. Geoffrey Smith's "Gas Turbines and Jet Propulsion for Aircraft". Mine is the

3rd edition, of 1945. Earlier editions were wartime production and didn't discuss Whittle in quite such detail! It's a good book on aircraft like the Italian Campini, an early "jet" that used a piston engine to drive the compressor.