I came across this article by Hank Morris ? after looking at the Liliput offers on @ Rails Of Sheffield.
formatting link
What a great way to run loco's !
No fumes or dirt ( some may say that's part of the fun of steam lcoc's ) Costs less to operate & safer Significantly quieter in operation Reliable & easier to operate No dangerous CO2 or other obnoxious products of combustion, a true eco' friendly loco No firing-up period Few working parts
Just think what might have been if they had the thin but highly efficient insulation materials we have today back in the 1900's
I know Boot the Chemists at Nottingham had one, in blue, as it's at Butterley
Erm, how do you think the steam injected into these fireless engines was produced? As with all stored-energy machines, the energy has be generated and stored somewhere else until needed. In the case of fireless locos, that was a boiler house. Fireless locos were less efficient than fired ones, because a) it takes work (== energy) to pump steam into the reservoir; and b) the steam in the fireless loco was at a lower temperature and pressure than in a fired loco. For compressed air locos, a very small fraction of the energy used to compress the air was finally available for traction. These locos were used only where extraneous factors, such as need for clean exhaust, or reduced fire hazard, made them necessary.
Bowater's narow gauge/ Sittingbourne & Kelmsley had one or two. handy for paper mills. Please don't buy into the fallacy that CO2 is somehow dangerous to the environment, it is not, CO2 is thoroughly recycled by plants with photosynthesis. A 100% CO2 environment would asphyxiate you, but you wouldn't die from global warming.
In message , " snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com" writes
That would be why environmentalists are banging on about illegal deforestation in South America and the Philippines.
There's only so much CO2 a plant can process. Reducing the number of trees reduces the amount of CO2 that is processed. Therefore there is/will be more CO2 in the atmosphere. If CO2 were thoroughly recycled, its concentration in the atmosphere would not be increasing.
And in any case, I suggest you learn a bit more about carbon dioxide before disassociating it from global warming. You could start by looking at Wikipedia
formatting link
Carbon dioxide is an important greenhouse gas because it transmits visible light but absorbs strongly in the infrared and near-infrared.
Due to human activities such as the combustion of fossil fuels and deforestation, the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by about 35% since the beginning of the age of industrialization
You should also look at
formatting link
The greenhouse effect is the process in which the emission of infrared radiation by the atmosphere warms a planet's surface.
For the Earth's temperature to be in steady state so that the Earth does not rapidly heat or cool, this absorbed solar radiation must be very closely balanced by energy radiated back to space in the infrared wavelengths.
Use this quote with the first one above, and you will see that carbon dioxide does contribute to global warming, contrary to your assertion.
Not forgetting that the heat from the steam itself, rather than from the firebox, has to keep things warm - not over efficient I'd venture, particulary on a cold/wet day.
They were used in locations where sparks were a bad idea. There was a large collection at Priddys Hard munition depot in Gosport for just that reason. Probably more expensive to run as frequent trips back to the steam room to top up with steam due to limited range. As you say they could be environmentally friendly, depending on the energy source used to raise the steam the same arguments apply to electrification, but even with better insulation still not very efficient.
And don't forget that a young tree uses 3 x more C02 than a mature one, so using timber, in a sustainable way, is a Good Thing.
We had a run-in with a grumpy idiot last weekend when burning a load of cardboard. "Oh wailey! You are causing global warming doing that" he cried. "No were are not" we replied. Buring cardboard is carbon neutral (i.e. there is no increase in CO2). For the amount involved getting a lorry out to collect it would not have carbon neutral, since burning fossil fuels is not carbon neutral, hence we were doing the right thing environmentally. When he'd had what carbon neutral *really* means explained he could see our point, as he'd been labouring under missuse of the term as used by environmentists/government/media.
Other have passed comments on those remarks, but one aspect which has been missed is the safety element of a steam locomotive which doesn't have a fire - particularly in high risk areas where there is the risk of sparks from the loco(s) igniting inlammable fumes.
BP at Saltend near Hull used a fireless loco (not quite sure when, but I'm guessing 1950s or 1960s) for just that reason, and this image from one of my websites illustrates their example:-
and controlled forestation will eliminate the periodic immense wildfires which historically destroyed thousands of square miles of temperate zone forests.
Carbon dioxide is a linear molecule which possesses a temporary dipole moment: in order for it to behave as a green house gas, radiated energy has to disturb the electron cloud around the molecule, raise the energy level of the electron, which then, in order to return to their lowest energy level, emit a lower energy (= lower frequency) photon. In comparison to water vapour, CO2 is a minor player, which you can demonstrate to yourself by standing outside on a partially sunny day. As the clouds move over, your perceived temperature drops because the thermal energy has been diverted and re-radiated into space by the cloud.
H2O is a "bent" molecule which possesses a permanent dipole moment, with an unshared pair of electrons and readily acts as a greenhouse gas. Your second experiment is to stand outside on a clear night, then compare it to a cloudy night at the same time of the year. Cloudy nights are much warmer due to the greenhouse effect of water
Human production of CO2 is insignificant compared to the activity of termites. A single volcanic explosion can put millions of tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere in a matter of a few months.
fails to explain how any molecule can differentiate between incoming radiation and outgoing radiation, in fact, an understanding of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle would show that a molecule, or group of molecules cannot distinguish between incoming or outgoing radiation. If you consider it a problem of intersecting spheres (too detailed for this discussion) the balance of energy dissipation must be to favour energy loss from the system
The promoters of "Global Warming" have long since realised that their premise can be easily disproven, so the more subtle concept of "climate change" has been introduced. Climate change is a much more difficult thing to disprove because it assumes that the climate was relatively constant in the first place. If you study the archaelogical findings of London, you will find out that 10,000 years ago (that's ten thousand, not ten million, or ten billion) relatively recently in geological terms, certainly too recent for continental drift to be a factor; the area of south east prehistoric Britain had a savannah-like climate with an animal population akin to east Africa.
more recently, the Viking surge from Scandinavia was prompted by a global cooling, which made life in that region less tolerable.
Recent studies of Mars have shown polar ice caps receding, but such is the ideology of the day, that the simple answer, that it was due to solar radiation fluctuation was disallowed because it would sink the global warming ideology.
thanks for patronising me Jane, but it didn't work.
The other economic case for fireless locos was where the industrial plant had an excess of steam generation, so it would otherwise be going mostly to waste in a cooling chimney. Many chemical plants have spare steam production, so there is a triple-win for the fireless; cleaner, reduced spark risk, cheaper (almost free) fuel. Downside as others have said is the limited capacity of the storage reservoir and the time taken to re-charge.
There are supposed to be some still running near Vienna and the Balkans, maybe elsewhere. As well as safety factors, fireless locos have an advantage in factories where there is plenty of steam being produced anyway, for other reasons. Efficiency doesn't matter than much, as there is plenty of steam already, and you may as well put it into a loco as just vent it off to the sky or whatever.
I've never fallen for the CO2 fallacy but it would give some of those 'environmentalist lot' one less thing to complain about. I am sure I read somewhere that cows generate more CO2 than all of humans industry ?
The most dangerous emissions are those coming from the House of Commons.
Global warming or Climate change ...... call it what you like but I know one 'person' who will sort it out ............. Mother Nature ! This generation of humans have only been here, in relative terms, for a blink of an eye. Perhaps it's our natural evolution to kill ourselves off .... one way or another. As energy can not be destroyed the converting of fossil fuels is a 'natural' process.
I assume they used the Fireless loco @ Boots because of the danger of dust in the working environment ?
Please don't buy into the deniers who don't understand that the plant world has a limited capacity to reabsorb CO2, and who don't understand how CO2 creates the greenhouse effect.
For the record: without the greenhouse effect, this would be an ice planet. CO2 (and other gases) keeps us warm. But too much CO2 increase the greenhouse effect.
Climate change: goes on all the time. What's different now is that there is good evidence that it's happening faster than ever before -- much faster. Just how fast, nobody knows, Until computers made reasonably accurate climate modelling possible in the 1980s and later, it was thought that only catastrophic events such as meteorite impacts would trigger rapid climate change. It's now known that rapid climate change can be triggered by too much or too little of some factor in the weather/climate system. The climate is a chaotic system - that means that it can be stable while its components change until a trigger point is reached, when there will be sudden and more or less catastrophic change. (BTW, the math that demonstrates this is well within the grasp of a grammar school boy.)
Nobody knows for sure just how fast climate change is occurring right now. Our descendants will find out which predictions are correct. If it's as fast as some models imply (ie, 50-100 years), our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will curse us. If it's a little slower (500-1,000 years) our multi-great-grandchildren will be more than a little annoyed. If it's happening fast (1rourn 5,000-10,000 years), we needn't feel guilty for wasting so much fossil fuel so quickly.
Footnote; recent work in the forests of British Columbia has shown that higher temperatures increase the rate of decomposition of deadfall, etc, so much that temperate and boreal forest becomes a net emitter of CO2, not a net absorber.
It doesn't. There is more CO2 at low altitudes than at high ones. And at all altitudes pressure is lower. That's why the cabins of aircraft have to be pressurised, o'wise people would pass out from lack of oxygen.
The composition of air varies quite a bit. Eg, in a forest on a spring day there will be measurably more oxygen than in the same forest in winter. And in a city there will a good deal more CO2 and NOx, SO2, etc than in the country. Not to mention variations in H2O and dust of all kinds. The wind mixes things up quite a bit, but the air is not a uniform mixture. And wind happens because there is local heating and cooling of the air, which means lower/higher pressures. Air moves from the high pressure to low pressure areas, that's the wind.
Where there is no wind, there's no mixing. Thus, at the bottom of mine shafts you can get dangerously, even lethally, high concentrations of CO2 or other gases. About 18 months ago, a couple people died in British Columbia going into an old mine shaft (they were doing a survey) for this reason.
PolyTech Forum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.