Ted Frater wrote:
engineman wrote:
For the last 8 years I have been working on a steam powered cycle off
and on. I bought plans and parts of it in a kit from Cole's power
models, It is called the Vesuvius and was designed in 1884. it has a
combination fire tube and water tube boiler.
http://engineman69.home.comcast.net/...esouvious.html
In the original plans they called for a gasoline burner but I didn’t
like the idea of that (too dangerous for something I’m riding on) so I
built a propane burner. It’s patterned after the Reil burner but has a
closed end and hundreds of 1/16” holes in the 1” dia 6” burner tube.
http://engineman69.home.comcast.net/...assembled.html
When operating it on the street I found I could only go about 200
yards without running out of pressure.
http://engineman69.home.comcast.net/...atewheels.html
If I cranked the fuel supply up too much flames would come out of the
stack but not much benefit. I tried all sorts of ideas, remaking the
burner tube with more and smaller holes, feeding compressed air into
the burner, adding a feed water heating system and a tank to store
steam.
It helped a little but still the same problem. I thought that if I
used a fuel with more heat value it might help.
I tried MAPP gas which is a liquefiable gas with many more BTU’s than
propane. I was able to get steam up a lot faster but I found that once
I got going the flame had a tendency to start burning inside the tube.
I can’t explain the process but I notice that the heat output suffers
immensely.
I sometimes had that problem with propane so I made a bypass to the
control valve so I could blast the inburning flame out with a shot of
higher pressure gas.
Now I find that MAPP gas with its higher heat content turns my burner
tube red hot almost immediately and so I can’t blow out the inburning
flame.
I tried acetylene but it had the same problem.
Engineman

Interesting problem.
I understand your wish to go for safety, however can I suggest you go
back to basics. You dont need to ride the bike to test it, it would be
worth building a test rig to support ther bike with a contact wheel on
the tyre turning a fan to simulate the riding/ traction load.
then build the burner as per the original design using gasoline.
Then run it under load on propane as your base line, then run it on
gasoline to see wether it does what its supposed to do.
If you get a towering inferno you can have an extinwisher handy.
;let us know how you get on.
ted
In dorset Uk.

Apologies for coming back so soon, forgot to mention something important.
Now both you and i know that propane has a high calorific value, but it
also has a serious disadvantage, That is its flame rate is very much
slower than say acetylene or gasoline.
this is best illustrated by thefact that you can weld with acetylene
and oxygen but you cant weld with propane and oxygen.
thesame limitation applies to mappgas and butane.
The reason the flame started to burn insideof the tube is its slow flame
rate.
What counts with these gas mixtures is the BTU's per second you can
generate.
If you tried propane and oxygen it would be much better. acetylene and
oxygen as per a cutting torch, youll find youll probably have too much
steam!!.
hope this helps.
Ted.