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Steam powered car! - Warning

Steam powered cars have n't been used for say 200 years.

There has been a lot of innovation since then. I wonder what 200 years year innovation could do to improve steam power?

An alternative way to heat up, instead of coal?

It is kind of crazy..... I don't feel green buying an electric car, when I think about the battery components, which have limited life span.....

Steam powered car! - Andrew-T

Steam powered cars haven't been used for say 200 years.

Not so. There are still a few up and running - one appeared on TV only the other week, and I saw one beside the Welshpool & Llanfair steam railway about 10 years ago. They have remarkable acceleration. Agreed they are a rare sight though.

I can't think of a alternative green fuel which could boil water. The established method is to burn fossilised wood in some form (not good for CO2), and a reservoir of water is needed too.

Steam powered car! - badbusdriver

Steam powered cars have n't been used for say 200 years

Not quite, take about 110 years off your estimate and you'll be closer!.

I seem to remember reading that steam is actually very inefficient in terms of how much motive power from a given amount of 'fuel'

An alternative way to heat up, instead of coal?

Not sure about cars, but many steam trains used oil due to the scarcity of solid fuels. Probably the most famous being the Union Pacific Big Boy in the USA. But Russian and Chinese steam locomotives also used oil.

Steam powered car! - badbusdriver

Jay Leno has at least three steam powered cars, the youngest of which is a 1925 Doble E-20 which is extremely advanced for its age.

Steam powered car! - Sofa Spud

There were steam cars in the early days of motoring and some were quite sophisticated. Doble, I think, was the last manufacturer of steam cars, into the 1930s.

Since then there have been various experimental or one-off steam cars but they are less thermally efficient than petrol or diesel cars and probably even more polluting.

A steam car uses two fuels - a combustion fuel to heat the water and the water itself to produce steam pressure to drive the vehicle. This means the car would need a fuel tank and a water tank. It's possible to fit condensing apparatus to the car so that the steam can be captured, cooled back into water and re-used in the boiler but this apparatus is bulky and heavy.

The best bet for the future is electric cars allied with renewable electricity generation. This is the direction we're going already.

Edited by Sofa Spud on 10/10/2021 at 14:45

Steam powered car! - edlithgow

A steam car uses two fuels - a combustion fuel to heat the water and the water itself to produce steam pressure to drive the vehicle. This means the car would need a fuel tank and a water tank. It's possible to fit condensing apparatus to the car so that the steam can be captured, cooled back into water and re-used in the boiler but this apparatus is bulky and heavy.

Not really"two fuels". The water is the transmission medium, in this case in gaseous form.

Steam powered car! - alan1302

It is kind of crazy..... I don't feel green buying an electric car, when I think about the battery components, which have limited life span.....

Yet you would feel green burning coal? Odd! LOL

Steam powered car! - edlithgow

Mine may be very slightly steam powered.

Some of the time (I take it off for the 6-monthly inspections) I have an IV line into the air filter which sucks a little water at revs much above idle.

This is mostly for decoke, but theoretically it may convert a little of the waste heat into motive force. Potentially there is also an anti-knock effect.

I suppose a slight head gasket leak could also give a very minor accidental steam power effect, so there are probably more steam powered cars out there than you think.

Steam powered car! - Will deBeast

Steam powered cars have n't been used for say 200 years.

There has been a lot of innovation since then. I wonder what 200 years year innovation could do to improve steam power?

An alternative way to heat up, instead of coal?

It is kind of crazy..... I don't feel green buying an electric car, when I think about the battery components, which have limited life span.....

Wait until you discover how a nuclear power station works!

www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-101-how-does-nu...k

Edited by Will deBeast on 11/10/2021 at 07:27

Steam powered car! - edlithgow

Steam powered cars have n't been used for say 200 years.

There has been a lot of innovation since then. I wonder what 200 years year innovation could do to improve steam power?

An alternative way to heat up, instead of coal?

It is kind of crazy..... I don't feel green buying an electric car, when I think about the battery components, which have limited life span.....

Wait until you discover how a nuclear power station works!

www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-101-how-does-nu...k

Wait until you discover how it doesn't...ah, already been done, several times..

I'm sure there is still lots of potential for further discovery though.

Edited by edlithgow on 12/10/2021 at 00:46

Steam powered car! - madf

Not quite steam but..

"The Ford Nucleon is a concept car developed by Ford in 1957, designed as a future nuclear-powered car—one of a handful of such designs during the 1950s and '60s. The concept was only demonstrated as a scale model. The design did not include an internal-combustion engine; rather, the vehicle was to be powered by a small nuclear reactor in the rear of the vehicle, based on the assumption that this would one day be possible by reducing sizes. The car was to use a steam engine powered by uranium fission, similar to those found in nuclear submarines.[1]

The mock-up of the car can be viewed at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon

Steam powered car! - Terry W

Look up Stanley Steamers - they manufactured steam cars until 1924. They were actually very highly regarded and drove far better than early petrol.

The capacity of petrol vehicles to start immediately compared to a steam up time of ~30 minutes started to make them obselete post WW1.

Steam lorries where greater torque was more important survived into the 1950s, particularly in industrial settings - docks, mining etc.

Steam powered car! - Sofa Spud

Apparently a lot of old steam lorries had their lives extended by being re-bodied as tar tankers. This is because steam provided an easy means of keeping the tar in the tank hot. Also road repair gangs were familiar with steam because there were still a lot of steam rollers in use in the 1950s.

Edited by Sofa Spud on 12/10/2021 at 14:05

Steam powered car! - badbusdriver

Look up Stanley Steamers - they manufactured steam cars until 1924. They were actually very highly regarded and drove far better than early petrol.

The capacity of petrol vehicles to start immediately compared to a steam up time of ~30 minutes started to make them obselete post WW1.

One of the things that made the Doble, mentioned earlier, so advanced as a steam car was the fact that it only took about 30 seconds to get it 'up to steam' and ready to go. But they were massively expensive, something like $20,000 when you could buy a new Ford for under $300!. Jay Leno has (or had) two Doble's, one of which used to be owned by Howard Hughes!. They were also extremely fast, Howard Hughes apparently did over 130mph in his, and they are reckoned to get from rest to 75mph in under 10 seconds.

Steam lorries where greater torque was more important survived into the 1950s, particularly in industrial settings - docks, mining etc.

Not sure what steam trucks were making, but according to Jay Leno, his ex Howard Hughes Doble has over 1000 lb/ft of torque from rest (the most powerful version of the 6.75 V8 engined Bentley Arnage made 737 lb/ft at 3200 rpm)!

Steam powered car! - focussed

A bit of a niche UK hobby or sport is tethered model hydroplane racing.

A flash steam powered hydroplane run here- action starts at about 2.20

youtu.be/xdeUe9JcBVU

www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/9958059.york-engineers-mo.../

The motive power is a small 14cc reciprocating steam engine driving a propeller.

A very british hobby - standing in water on a rainy day playing with model boats!