Joe Burgard
Member
First off, I'd like to say hello to all on this board since I just joined here. I find this site to be very informative.
After reading Samuel Halpern's article "Titanic Prime Mover", I thought I would like to take the analysis of the triple expansion engines further and contribute to my and for other people to understand the workings of these engines. I'm doing this from an actual design/mechanical engineer's perspective, so technical language will be used.
In order to do this I need specific details about the engines such as the clearance, piston clearance, indicator diagrams, etc, of each of the cylinders (Any of the Olympic class liners would do).
Where can I obtain this information and are there actual blueprints/plans of the engines?
I decided to do this since I found a mistake in his article about steam consumption (footnote 3) and I would like to further my understanding of triple expansion engines (will build one someday). There he calculates a rate of 6262 lbs/min of steam. However, if you take the energy available from 230 pisa (1200.8 BTU/lb) to 1 psia (1105.7 BTU/lb) steam for that mass flow rate, there is not enough energy to produce the 45,000 HP.
6,262 lbs/min * (1200.8-1105.7) BTU/lb *.023581 HP/(BTU/min) = 14043 HP
As you can see this is only 1/3 of the actual power output of Titanic's engines at full speed.
After reading Samuel Halpern's article "Titanic Prime Mover", I thought I would like to take the analysis of the triple expansion engines further and contribute to my and for other people to understand the workings of these engines. I'm doing this from an actual design/mechanical engineer's perspective, so technical language will be used.
In order to do this I need specific details about the engines such as the clearance, piston clearance, indicator diagrams, etc, of each of the cylinders (Any of the Olympic class liners would do).
Where can I obtain this information and are there actual blueprints/plans of the engines?
I decided to do this since I found a mistake in his article about steam consumption (footnote 3) and I would like to further my understanding of triple expansion engines (will build one someday). There he calculates a rate of 6262 lbs/min of steam. However, if you take the energy available from 230 pisa (1200.8 BTU/lb) to 1 psia (1105.7 BTU/lb) steam for that mass flow rate, there is not enough energy to produce the 45,000 HP.
6,262 lbs/min * (1200.8-1105.7) BTU/lb *.023581 HP/(BTU/min) = 14043 HP
As you can see this is only 1/3 of the actual power output of Titanic's engines at full speed.