Friction Steam Boiler

[rickoff]

I'll keep designing the wood gasifier boiler that I'd like to build.

That's a worthwhile project too, but can you build it without having any heat wasted to the atmosphere?

Rick

[rickoff]

Clearly energy must be coming from the wood.

Yes, practically all of the derived heat comes from the energy "stored" in the wood, which is then transfered to the rotor and the steam vessel. I don't believe that you can get any more, or any less, heat extraction from the wood during the friction process than you could from a fast burn in a wood stove or conventional boiler. The difference between the two proccesses, of course, is that in Lloyd's friction method practically all of the derived heat is captured and usable. No device, that actually burns wood, can make that claim, since the greatest part of burned wood heat production is by necessity vented to the atmosphere, either through a smokestack or chimney device. Quite simply, the air intake necessary to maintain a burn must have a means of escape in order to create a continuous draft. If you close the draft control on a wood stove, the fire quickly goes out. Lloyd's device is designed to be fairly airtight, so that any existing draft is minimal. If you use hard green wood in this friction device, the wood will get very hot at the frictional surface. It will get hot enough to char, and it may even glow. It may attempt to ignite occasionally, and when that occurs there may be a small puff of smoke emitted, but without a continuous draft the wood can not ignite and remain burning.

I hope that helps to clarify any possible misconceptions.

Best regards, Rick

[rileydad48]

Hi there...

In the original video that started this whole thread.. Llyod states on camera.. " with these four pieces of wood, I've got enough to run this for a month"... If you were to burn 4 pieces of oak 4"x4"x24" in one of the best
wood heaters today.. how long would you expect it to last.. maybe just maybe 10 to 12 hours.. and that would be with the air flow cut so low that the wood would just smolder in the furnace.. In the "friction" design, even if the wood pieces last only half of the quoted time...(now its eight pieces for the month) then you're still way ahead of the game..
I for one, am tired of the price of natural gas.. and it's constantly rising price.. it's worse than gasoline.. because it never comes back down.. I have a 2200sq ft house and my bill for gas was over 300.00 last month. It has great insulation, 2x6 stud walls and double paine windows and I keep the thermostat at 68 degrees.. Last month wasn't any where near as cold as this month has been.. I'm probably looking at over 400.00 gas bill this month.
What I'm getting at is this, one could argue the efficency of Tanners boiler and the efficency of Tesla's steam turbine till we're blue in the face.!! Let's say you use Tanner's boiler only as a water heater (forget the steam for a minute), heating water to 150 to 180 degrees and using it (1)in a water to air heat exchanger for heating the house and (2) for domestic hot water, and you can do this with only eight pieces of wood for the whole month..!!
Would that not be a whole lot better than using natural gas..
Now lets add in the fact that Tanner's boiler can create steam using the same eight pieces of wood. Steam to power a generator to produce electricity. Tanners original boiler produced steam at 500 degrees and maintaned 50 to 80 psi.. good heat but not enough pressure. !! So he built a better one.. One that gets up to 700 degrees and maintanes 300 psi.. using 18 pieces of wood.. and lets assume that you would need 36 pieces of wood for an entire month. Which sounds high to me, but for this discussion we are doubling the wood used just for to be overly safe. Now we are producing electricity to power the house and the using the resulting hot water for heating and domestic use too.. Is this not a "Win- Win" situation.. and we're doing it all with a renewable energy source.... WOOD. At a far better price than natuarl gas or even burning the wood in a conventional heater..
So in closing... if the total efficency of the whole system is less than 50%, it's not really that big a problem.. Unless wood goes to 1000.00 a cord.
But even if it were that expensive... add up your gas and electric bills for the whole year and see what that comes to... What's it worth to tell NIPSCO (gas) and I&M (electric) to go jump in the lake...

Thanks for listening...
Paul

[Jetijs]

Hi all
I decided to give a Tesla turbine a try. I will make a small model turbine to see how it performs and if it truly has a potential. So far I have only the turbine blades cut out in the exact shape as in the patent drawings:



The blades are about the size of a CD. Now I need to make a housing for the blades. I was thinking about something like this:




The housing will be cut out from some sheets of acrylic and glued together. I have yet to draw everythin else in 3d.
Thanks,
Jetijs

[rileydad48]

Jetijs...
Nice work on the blades or "runners" as Tesla called them.. Is your turbine to be a motor or a pump..?

[Jetijs]

So far it will be a pump, will see how it performs.

[Jetijs]

I am also looking on the second Tesla turbie patent. I mean this one:




In the first picture everything is more or less clear to me, but have a look at the second picture. I can't figure out what the purpose of the cicrular grooves (26) and labyrinth packing (27) is. In patent nothing is said about their purpose, just that these things are there. I suppose one of the purposes is to prohibit the air/steam/fluids to go straight from the end blades to the exit without going in circular motion in between blades. Could someone clarify this for me?
Thanks.

[little_old_lady]

L.O.L.;

1. I called it a friction heater because thats what Lloyd called it all along. And I had thought, like you and others here, that the wood was combusting also. The more I look at it, the more I think it is friction at work, at least partly. Burning wood doesn't actually burn. It starts pyrolysis at about 450F and dry oak auto-ignites at about 8-900F. The moisture outgases first as it boils at 212F, then as the moisture level falls the temp can rise to start the wood gas process.(pyrolysis) Light a match and look at it closely. There is a space between the flame and the wood. The heat from the flame is "cooking" the wood gas out of the wood. Thats why you need dry wood to start a fire easily. And the friction heater uses green oak! The testing I've done proves to me that green is better than dry. So until proven otherwise, IMHO there is more friction going on than most will admit. Maybe there is something happening at the atomic level!?

2. Where are you getting the 1 hp motor powering a 3-5 hp steam engine? Lloyd's new heater design puts out 125,000 BTU/hr which MIGHT run a 3 hp engine! And I think I remember seeing Rick mention 4hp or so to drive it. IMHO thats optimistic! Thats where the Tesla turbine came swooping in to save the day at 95% efficiency! All I'm saying is that the modern steam engine(not the Green engine) is our only hope to have a self-runner IMHO. And lets face it, if its not a self-runner, then its a boat anchor. Again, prove me wrong. I would love to be wrong about this but instinct prevails for now. Meanwhile, I'll keep designing the wood gasifier boiler that I'd like to build.

You bring up some good points and it makes you wonder "why does green wood work better than dry if it must boil off the water"

My understanding is that a 3HP steam engine puts off 100K BTU of exhaust heat. Which means you may have a point about 125K BTU being barely enough to power a 3HP steam engine particularly if the 125K BTU must be used for the heat of vaporization.

So perhaps I am getting my numbers confused by mixing specs from an early machine with results from a newer machine. Are you saying that the 125K BTU machine required a 3-4HP engine? If this information is correct then this heater is worthless for producing electrical power from wood without a 40%+ eff tesla turbine and even then the surplus energy would be small compared to the effort required to get it.

So perhaps we can lay out the input/output specs for each version of Lloyds heaters.

If there is not enough heat to produce a self-runner then this device is little more than an efficient air/water heater.

I need 150 psi to power a 3 HP steam engine.

[rileydad48]

Jetijs...
In the second drawing from the patent.. I see nothing about the horizontal shaft that would keep it from moving in and out.. Maybe the grooves and the packing are just the way he stablize the blade assembly within the housing.. the friction area between the blades and the case is at a minimum because the grooves come to almost a point. Just a thought..

Paul

[amigo]

Hi Jetijs,

Maybe these will help dring the process of construction:

Jeffery Hayes - Tesla Engine, a new dimension for power.pdf

W.M.J. Cairns - The Tesla Disc Turbine.pdf

[Jetijs]

Thanks amigo
I got it now. The labyrinth seal does exactly what I thought it will do, it seals the the space between the outer blades and turbine casing so that no air/steam/fluid can go directly from the input to the output without traveling in between the blades in circular motion. Here is an example of such seal:


But I still don't get what those circular grooves are for

[rickoff]

Thanks amigo
I got it now. The labyrinth seal does exactly what I thought it will do, it seals the the space between the outer blades and turbine casing so that no air/steam/fluid can go directly from the input to the output without traveling in between the blades in circular motion.
But I still don't get what those circular grooves are for

Hi Jetijs,

Thanks for the excellent photos and diagrams. Your Tesla pump should be able to move a lot of water very quickly.

You are quite right about the purpose of the labyrinth seals in the old Tesla turbine patent. The only thing which seems to make sense to me about the circular grooves is that they may act as either an air or water cushion which helps to add stability to the end discs and also make the seals more effective by doing that.

You say your discs are approximately CD diameter, so I'm guessing they are roughly about 4.7 inches, or 118 mm - somewhere in that range. What is the material and thickness of the discs?

You may also find Tesla's latest improvement to his turbine design to be of interest, as it appears to offer greatly enhanced stability. Here is a diagram view from that British patent:


You can see that the discs at each end of the disc assembly are considerably thicker than the inner ones, and that they taper progressively thinner - to about double the thickness of the inner discs - at their outer edge. Regarding this change in design, Tesla wrote:

"In the new design I employ two heavier end-plates, which are machined tapering toward the periphery for the purpose of reducing the maximum centrifugal stress as much as practicable." - Nikola Tesla

You can read more about this improved design by going here:
Nikola Tesla: Disk Turbine/Pump, part 2

It would be great if you can incorporate these improvements.

Thanks again, and keep up the good work.

Best regards to you,

Rick

[nonubbins]

L.O.L
The 4 hp I quoted Rick on should have been 9 hp!(post #183) And I completely agree with that based on my lathe using a .75 hp motor and barely keeping up!


That's a worthwhile project too, but can you build it without having any heat wasted to the atmosphere?

No. But at least the concepts and ideas do work and it works better than most wood stoves!

In the original video that started this whole thread.. Llyod states on camera.. " with these four pieces of wood, I've got enough to run this for a month"... If you were to burn 4 pieces of oak 4"x4"x24" in one of the best
wood heaters today.. how long would you expect it to last.. maybe just maybe 10 to 12 hours.. and that would be with the air flow cut so low that the wood would just smolder in the furnace.. In the "friction" design, even if the wood pieces last only half of the quoted time...(now its eight pieces for the month) then you're still way ahead of the game.

He also said that a pair of blocks lasted about 3 days. That equals 20 for the month on the original. The new design has twice the surface speed so twice the blocks!? Thats 9 pair x 40=360 blocks. A cord of wood with air space is 4x4x8=126 cu ft. The blocks without spaces stack 12x3.3x2=79 cu ft. 79/126=62% of a cord and if you figure in the air space its closer to 75%. I figure a decent wood boiler in the 120,000btu range for my house would use close to a cord a month. And that much resawed oak would not be as cheap as you think unless DIY.


What I'm getting at is this, one could argue the efficency of Tanners boiler and the efficency of Tesla's steam turbine till we're blue in the face.!! Let's say you use Tanner's boiler only as a water heater (forget the steam for a minute), heating water to 150 to 180 degrees and using it (1)in a water to air heat exchanger for heating the house and (2) for domestic hot water, and you can do this with only eight pieces of wood for the whole month..!!

Now we are talking my language. I've been advocating a hot water system the whole time I've been here. (post #167) Lets reduce the size of the heater to 5 pairs of blocks and get 65,000 btu and mount the roller assembly under a 100 gal(800 lbs) water tank. That could heat the tank from 140F to 180F about twice an hour running 24 hrs/day with a 5 hp motor. At $.063/KWH it would cost us $5.67/day or $170 a month plus costs of wood and cut about $40 from electric water heater! Compare that to my expected $2000 fuel oil bill even with the price decline so far! Now we have something and it would be much cheaper to set up using off the shelf controls, pumps, aquastats, etc.


Now lets add in the fact that Tanner's boiler can create steam using the same eight pieces of wood. Steam to power a generator to produce electricity. Tanners original boiler produced steam at 500 degrees and maintaned 50 to 80 psi.. good heat but not enough pressure. !! So he built a better one.. One that gets up to 700 degrees and maintanes 300 psi.. using 18 pieces of wood.. and lets assume that you would need 36 pieces of wood for an entire month. Which sounds high to me, but for this discussion we are doubling the wood used just for to be overly safe. Now we are producing electricity to power the house and the using the resulting hot water for heating and domestic use too.. Is this not a "Win- Win" situation.. and we're doing it all with a renewable energy source.... WOOD. At a far better price than natuarl gas or even burning the wood in a conventional heater..

Again, why pay for upwards 9 hp worth of electric and get MAYBE 3 hp worth of steam to generate 1/3 the electric!

Jetijs:
Looks good. And you didn't make the common mistake of making the intake/exhaust ports on the disks too small. Will be interesting!

You bring up some good points and it makes you wonder "why does green wood work better than dry if it must boil off the water"

I think the moisture keeps the fibers soft enough so that the friction can actually produce heat. When I used dry oak, the rubbed surface would carbon up a lot and the heat output would decline with it. As someone previously mentioned, carbon is extremly hard i.e. brushes on an electric motor. Friction creates heat better when one surface is softer than another. The green oak is just some cheap, disposable brushes. We could build a friction heater using disposed tires!

[nonubbins]

Its not letting me edit the post above so.....

EDIT: I forgot that the new design use a roller twice as big! So will a 5 hp pull a 5 pair heater? If we used 10 hp, the electric bill would be $338! Now my fuel oil is not looking as bad.

[Jetijs]

Rick,
thank you for the improved patent. I did not know about such patent
My blades are 1mm thick. Do you perhaps now where I could get a suitable labyrinth seal? I searched all around the web, but could not find anything good.
As always, your posts are worth a million
Thank you!