I am back to serious woodstoving for home heating now as of 10/10/2018.
Hours and hours of observing wood-to-heat energy conversion puts me back to trying to put in order the differences in the ways to turn tree woods into usable energies. Sun → Tree → Me&mine
Wood-to-heat always, for-best-conversion is exaggerating for TEMPERATURE with pressure-made as a minor player = Tp.
Wood to shaft power, for-best-conversion is exaggerating for PRESSURE with heat as the minor player = Pt.
Really guys a wood stove, wood furnace does make and need some pressure energy to function. Now with more woodgasifing for engine fuel your system inches of water and millibar pressures systems monitoring shows this.
Wood gasifing-for fuel and the made fuel gases blend sent to an engine for power shaft making the PRESSURE capable of making is the major with heat made a necessary minor sister.
An extreme example of Pt is firearms. Solid-to-gasious PRESSURE-made against a movable bullet is what make it work the best. Heat-made is actually detrimental to moving that bullet. But unavoidable. Pt.
Think of an internal combustion piston engine as a self-resetting bullet-piston. With the bullet-pistons PRESSURE driven power movement converted to rotary power. Pulsing power admittedly. Why carry though flywheels and multi-power pulse smoothing multi-cyclinder engines. Actually very efficient Pt.
Just as nearly full stociometric (75-90% of all of the fuel hydrogen’s and carbon’s split-out, separated, and re-bound to an atmospheric oxegens) woodstoving is very efficient Tp.
And where does TP fit? External combustion engines. Steam piston engines. Steam turbine engines.
Of course these work to overall make and use fuels converted to BOTH temperature and pressure.
Think about it. Observe these as best engineered in real life. Steam-for-heating always has a huge pressure danger that has to be engineered and operated into usable safety.
Steam-to-shaft power to gain efficiency always needs to drive UP the TP to hard on materials engineering levels. Why the turbines require super-materials, machined and balance out to Expensive to do levels. Why the late 1950’s true-high-performance piston steam guys tried running their cast iron cylinders so hot that they would red/white glow translucent to try and match the by then post WWII advanced IC engines fuel efficiencies.
And tp? Wood breaking down degrading over TIME.
Yep. Time. A third factor in it all.
This would all best be visualized by a good illustrator as three overlapping circles. With the three-overlap as the best-usable area. The circles individually larger and smaller to represent their biased order-of-importance.
Ha! Now in real life engineering you will need to visualize/illustrate/design-model in 3-D for a five sphere overlap best-posibilites area.
Have to add a fourth element in the operators/users. A fifth element representing initial building investment/usable-life costs factor.
For real-in-this-world usable engineering you will never have less than five balls/factors to be constantly juggling.
Understand this and you will have the why’s that diesel/electric locomotives replaced out steam locomotives.
Why big IC piston engines are still the power of choice in lowest costs ocean shipping.
Steve unruh
Ha! Ha! Of course in your own visualization you should add more relevant factors/elements “spheres of possibilities”.
I personally place a high value on Complexity. In things mechanical that will encompass frictions, moving masses/motion, direction changes, number of precision needed surfaces, fasteners to hold all of the wig-its into functional positions, etc. The more doors you create for Mr Murphy; the more often he will come to visit, causing problems. “The Devil-is-in-the-details.” “KISS”-reigns.
The COMPLEXITY sphere of possibilities - adversely multiplies difficulties/costs in all other factors. Especially troublesome on the human factors.
Regards
Steve unruh
A magnetohydrodynamic generator (MHD generator) is a magnetohydrodynamic converter that transforms thermal energy and kinetic energy into electricity. MHD generators are different from traditional electric generators in that they operate at high temperatures without moving parts. MHD was developed because the hot exhaust gas of an MHD generator can heat the boilers of a steam power plant, increasing overall efficiency. MHD was developed as a topping cycle to increase the efficiency of electric generation, especially when burning coal or natural gas. MHD dynamos are the complement of MHD accelerators, which have been applied to pump liquid metals, seawater and plasmas.
An MHD generator, like a conventional generator, relies on moving a conductor through a magnetic field to generate electric current. The MHD generator uses hot conductive ionized gas (a plasma) as the moving conductor. The mechanical dynamo, in contrast, uses the motion of mechanical devices to accomplish this. MHD generators are technically practical for fossil fuels, but have been overtaken by other, less expensive technologies, such as combined cycles in which a gas turbine’s or molten carbonate fuel cell’s exhaust heats steam to power a steam turbine.
Natural MHD dynamos are an active area of research in plasma physics and are of great interest to the geophysics and astrophysics communities, since the magnetic fields of the earth and sun are produced by these natural dynamos.
Ha! With my “still using Big IC piston engine for cheapest possible ocean shipping” I did put my foot in it a bit. Needing more expanded out explaining how this fits into Pt, and now PthcF! Pressure+temperature+human+complexity+Friction best-possibility envelope.
First most important factor to this is that large scale ocean shipping originates and ends at large city/industrial ports. These all have a problem of generating accumulating amounts of contaminated/mixed heavy oils and greases. These BIG piston ships engines are designed to be first started heated up on good spec grade oil fuels then switched over to being able to fuel with only slightly de-watered, non-buffered, unknown very-mixed industrial/city waste oils-greases. Ha! And engine generated heat circulated down to get some of these “bunker-fuels” even to be pump-able.
It’s true. Off US coasts deep sea charter fishing I’ve seen these large transport ships changing back over from visible black smoking “fuels” to clean burning spec grade fuel at the 12 mile line to conform to US/Canadian air quality standards.
These engines are all large inline and narrow V multi-cylinder. Interesting to look up the operating specs on these. The l-o-n-g piston stroke maintains the same flame-front speed/pressure as our much smaller piston IC engines. Low, low engine RPM and low cylinder side thrust does this.
Turning a humans modern civilization waste problem into a transportation asset is a worthy job in my viewpoint.
I have US CoastGuradsmen of top enlisted rank in the family. Seen personally escorted on-ship their very powerful, fast, high speed turbine engines. They would NEVER jeopardized these with unknown fuels!! And the smaller piston engined CoastGuard boats must be 100% reliable from instant standing start to all-out race-to-rescue. AND any commercial charter boat operator jeopardizing his piston engine diesel Perkins, Caterpillar, John Deere with non-spec fuel will become a CoastGuard rescue. Never get re-insurance and re-licensing.
The railroad from 150 years evolving to highly advanced steam, to diesel-electric? Needed humans Labor, labors, laboring #1. Fuel-use, and engine-use scheduling flexibility’s #2. You can look up the reduced man-power hours from steam maintenance/operating to the IC piston engines. Gee . . . a 450,000 pound steam locomotive that can never get smaller, lighter, less fuel using . . . versus from as few as one, to two, up to five linked diesel-electrics, both pulling and pulling . . .
A no brain’er solution choice fellows.
