External combustion engine

[plodder]

Not sure if the name is entirely accurate but anyway.

https://mobile.twitter.com/TheDreadShip ... 0802194435

[lpm]

Oh great, another moron-gif twitter thread. For stupid people who need silly illustrations.

[tenchboy]

Thanks plodder, enjoyed that. I especially liked the illustration of Alfred Nobel's aluminium yacht. I don't know much about boats but that looked pretty slick to me.

[tenchboy]

Ah!

[Grumble]

Seems entirely lifted from Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naphtha_l ... prov=sfti1

Not that it’s a bad thing to promote interesting stuff everywhere, but it would be nice to throw credit around (unless of course I have the order of events the wrong way around, and maybe the Twitter thread writer also wrote the wiki page)

[nekomatic]

Given Wikipedia’s mission is to spread knowledge for free for the greater good of humanity*, it seems a bit churlish to complain of someone taking Wikipedia content** for free and spreading it for the greater good of humanity, but with pictures.

And for anyone who doesn’t like moronic Twitter threads, I can reveal to you this one weird old trick for not having to see them.

* Well I assume it’s something like this
** if they have in fact done so

[Bird on a Fire]

Yeah, what a bunch of killjoy nyer-nyers upthread.

[lpm]

The day we stop fighting back against stupidity is the day the world goes to sh.t.

That day was in early 2004.

[Bird on a Fire]

The day we stop fighting back against stupidity is the day the world goes to sh.t.

That day was in early 2004.

TLDR

Can u do a emoji+gif version plz.

[Boustrophedon]

The various article seem to skate over the one salient feature that made early steam engines dangerous; the large volume of superheated water present in a fire tube boiler. Later water tube boilers are much less prone to catastrophic explosions as there is less water and hence less stored energy and the inherent strength of small tubes versus a big cylindrical vessel, critical crack length and all that.

Using naphtha in a 'water tube' design is quite logical in an engineering sense so long as you use a high degree of superheat, else the Carnot efficiency is low.

It should be noticed that the CANDU nuclear reactor is a water tube design whereas all the other designs AGR and PWRs are essentially fire tube designs with large pressure vessels.

[plodder]

The various article seem to skate over the one salient feature that made early steam engines dangerous; the large volume of superheated water present in a fire tube boiler. Later water tube boilers are much less prone to catastrophic explosions as there is less water and hence less stored energy and the inherent strength of small tubes versus a big cylindrical vessel, critical crack length and all that.

Using naphtha in a 'water tube' design is quite logical in an engineering sense so long as you use a high degree of superheat, else the Carnot efficiency is low.

It should be noticed that the CANDU nuclear reactor is a water tube design whereas all the other designs AGR and PWRs are essentially fire tube designs with large pressure vessels.

I quite like the idea of a petrol-cooled nuclear reactor.

[Martin Y]

I quite like the idea of a petrol-cooled nuclear reactor.

Slightly less of an instant "Wait, what?" than sodium cooled ones.

[EACLucifer]

These sound dangerous, but they actually worked reasonably well. They were generally quite low pressure, and not the most efficient, but as a way of dodging a regulation that honestly wasn't really very necessary for small water-tube boilers, they were fine.