There are, of course, effective ways of burning anthracite or culm in locomotives; Angus Sinclair’s History of the Locomotive Engine takes up many of the attempts in useful detail. In particular anything with a Wootten boiler will manage, and locomotives with those could be quite large and powerful and also quite fast – the fastest locomotives in the world in the early 1890s were so equipped. But it becomes difficult to get the heat release to do both at the same time… which is the prerequisite for the rapid steam generation in good modern locomotive practice.
The problem is that the heat-release characteristics for hard carbon are not favorable for the kind of luminous ‘distributed’ combustion that bituminous provides – you need a broad, thin fire and the combustion products come off largely transparent. Any attempts to build the kind of useful heel and thicker bed seen in advised bituminous firing practice lead to forge-like conditions when induced draft is applied, which is especially not happy for American grate designs in advanced practice like FireBar castings on a full rocking-grate linkage that must remain relatively undistorted to work. I in fact worked many hours in my youth designing a firing system for anthracite on a ~6000hp modern 4-8-4, and it can be done but it requires more careful skill than any bituminous engine of comparable output.
Of course the more important consideration was that, just as with all the various experiments to use ‘smokeless coke’ or slack via briquetting or consolidation, firing with actual anthracite was literally like shoveling diamonds into a fire: the fuel had too high an ‘opportunity cost’. For most of the big-steam era, ‘steam grade’ anthracite was still a high-value commodity for building heating, and it certainly was less practical to transport it at ‘railroad fuel margins’ very far from th
Graphene in the form of sheets or nanotubes is also an excellent heat conductor, and unlike diamond is also an excellent electrical conductor. The high thermal and electrical conductivity is due to the conduction electrons being above/below the plane of carbon atoms (outside/inside nanotubes). Conductivity is therefor much higher parallel to the plane (axis of the nanotube) than perpendicular.
I was going to mention graphene (note sp.) as it has the interesting property that in electrical conduction the electrons are free to move at relativistic drift speed in-plane, and that promised to make thermal conduction very fast as well.
Fun stuff, and just like aerogel and buckminsterfullerene you can make it at home!
Graphene is already used in heat spreaders for electronic applications. IIRC, the thermal conduction in graphene is related to the high electrical conductivity, whereas the thermal conduction in diamond is by phonons - diamonds made from carbon depleted in 13C has a higher thermal conductivity than natural carbon due to reduction in phonon scattering.
IIRC, conductivity of a bundle of carbon nanotubes can be much higher than copper.
What about Anthrasite and the DL&W? Phoebe Snow? “She took the road of Anthsite?”
Locos equpped with Wootens? Didn’t look like it?
Incidentally. the B&O had a few Wooten Camelbacks for freight on the third rail Staten Island Rapid Transit. Saw them regularly as a yougster. Lasted through WWII/
Warner (in 1940) pointed out that use of straight anthracite in DL&W passenger power ended around the time the use of relatively small engines for that service (4-4-0s and 4-6-0s) did. By 1915, new Lackawanna power was set up to burn a mixture of bituminous and anthracite, and of course all the more modern engines burned only bituminous, even though in theory they could have been adapted to burn some admixture of waste grade hard coal.
It is interesting that Warner mentions the development of the PRR E1 as being driven by a competitive need to run 60-minute trains between Philadelphia and Atlantic City with ‘no smoke, no cinders’ – and the Reading certainly had high-speed anthracite-burning locomotives! One might surmise that the very early electrification on West Jersey and Seashore might have been driven by this…
Hell, they brought her back with her own name train in 1949! (Her dress would stay white after dieselization anyway…)
Canpaign officially ended with restrictions on anthracite use for locomotive fuel in WWI.
Did you know there were at least two real ‘Phoebes’? And, at one time, a board game?
Something else I did not know and still have to research is that there was an earlier Lackawanna campaign featuring unsmirched women in white called “All in Lawn”. Presumably this had replaceable women in it, not the strong figure we rapidly came to admire… ah! what wonderful promise the new century offered…
Coal is the cheapest non-renewable energy that has been used widely in generating power if compared with oil. Just wondered, this will be an interesting debate if we include hydrogen fuel. German is the first country that has hydrogen fuel train back in 2016.
Hydrogen in transportation is what’s known as a ‘carrier’ fuel; its use is usually driven by concerns other than ‘economic’. In most cases, the cost to make and then supply hydrogen in suitable quantity to, say, fire a locomotive is far higher than even a fully renewable oil or ‘coal’ fuel would be, and there are further problems regarding its effective use for steam generation in a steel boiler structure.
Even the use of hydrogen in internal-combustion engines has been deprecated in favor of fuel cells producing electricity – and there, to provide sustainer charging to what us otherwise a battery-electric or multipower vehicle like Coradia iLINT.
Hydrogen is particularly unsuited to modern steam locomotives in its combustion characteristics. It has very high heat release, in transparent flame, and very low density, meaning that even liquefied or hydrided a large volume of storage, of materials not subject to hydrogen embrittlement or other issues, has to be provided.
A better use for hydrogen is as a feedstock in something like the Fischer-Tropsch process for ‘syngas’ and then liquid-fuel synthesis from either renewable or fossil sources of carbon. (This is generally cost-comparable technologically to ‘solvent refined coal’ processes to remove undesired impurities from various coal ranks – neither has generally been successful from an economic standpoint, and of course both are politically reviled as research or development priorities today.
(As would be development of hydrogen-burning steam power, especially reciprocating ‘conventional’ steam locomotives, but that’s beyond the issue of comparative fuels.)
One could always set up the output of the hydrogen burner to be directly injected into the boiler with a little injected into the dry pipe for superheating…
After all, the ultimate proposed steam engine was the Aerojet M-1 engine that would have been good for 1.5m pounds of thrust.
I don’t think I have explained things well enough. What is desirable in a locomotive’s radiant section is a long, luminous flame that does not touch the relatively cold walls enough to quench, and that just finishes the combustion causing the luminosity as the plume reaches the rear tubesheet, forward of the chamber.
Hydrogen is almost the antithesis of this: it burns very hot, very promptly, with a transparent flame with peaky spectrum, and while it is high-energy it is so light that a large volume is involved for high mass flow.
You may remember from anthracite discussions that there are problems vaporizing or levitating enough carbon to get the necessary rate of heat release for locomotive firing… at which point some parts of the firing system melt rather than act to transfer heat to steam. A large hydrogen blowpipe can be expected to cause far more spot overgeating and differential expansion problems, even before we take up cumulative hydrogen embrittlement as a potential structural concern.
Use in separately-fired superheaters of proper design would make better sense, but again the required mass flow makes co-firing with something that optimizes proper heat transfer – probably some high-carbon liquid – desirable. Besler tubes would be advisable, and while you might arrange hydrogen manifolding in them you’d need nanoinsulation inside, as Besler tubes are passive re-radiators.
If the reciprocating engine used hydrogen in internal combustion it would be one thing; if it could use reaction thrust like a glorified M-497 still better. Unfortunately we’re dealing with a practical extended Rankine cycl
My somewhat tongue in cheek proposal was that the heat transfer between the steam generated by burning hydrogen and the boiler water would be done by condensation of combustion products directly into the “boiler” water. Think charging up a fireless cooker. The “firebox” would resemble the combustion chamber of a small rocket engine as combustion would need to take place at somewhat above “boiler” pressure.
Makes a lot more sense to use hydrogen in fuel cells…
It is less tongue-in-cheek than you think: submerged burners are a ‘thing’ and they could certainly be made to work with stoich air-hydrogen flame. (Now for true fun you would of course use LH and LOX via turbopumps, with some kind of hypergolic igniter or flameholding – at appropriate scale of course. Ouch, I seem to have bitten the tongue that was in my cheek with excitement…
However why bother with all that combustion nonsense and firing up and wasted heat when the Oxford cycle generates 11 molecules of steam at 885 degrees from every molecule of methanol?