The Steam Engine: A Practical Guide to the Construction, Operation, and Care of Steam Engines, Steam Turbines, and Their Accessories; The Steam Engine ... and Their Accessories (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

There are various kinds of engines from which mechanical work is obtained by the expenditure of heat, la the gas engine a mixture of gas and air is burned in the cylinder, the heat thus generated being converted into work by the expansion of the products of combustion. The action in oil and hot-air engines is very similar. The most important of all heat engines, however, is the steam engine, in which the heat in steam is transformed into work. It will be useful to review briefly some of the stages through which it has passed in its development. The first steam engines of which we have any knowledge were described by Hero of A lexandria, in a book written two centuries before Christ. Some of them were very ingenious, but the best were little more than toys. From the time of Hero until the seventeenth century there was very little progress. At this time there began to be great need of steam pumps to remove water from the coal mines. In 1615, Salomon deC aus devised the following arrangement. A vessel, having a pipe leading from the bottom, was filled with water and then closed. Heat applied to the vessel caused steam to be formed, which forced the water through the pipe. A little later an engine was constructed in the form of a steam turbine; but it was unsuccessful, and the attention of inventors was again turned to pumps. Finally Thomas Savery completed, in 1693, the first commercially successful steam engine. It waa very wasteful of steam as compared with our engines of today, but as being the first engine to accomplish its task it was a grand success. Savery sengine (F ig. 1) consisted of two oval vessels placed side by side and in communication with a boiler. The lower parts were connected by tubes fitted with suitable valves. Steam from the boiler was admitted to one of the vessels and the air driven out.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

About the Publisher

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.