Ah, the stories some of these old birds got over on unsuspecting railfans or journalists!
Unlikely he’d get anything even remotely like this level of ‘heat’ in the combustion plume without dramatic levels of draft (and control of primary air). What would be necessary has been known since at least Sinclair’s day – think of coke as even-less-combustible anthracite as you read the history of hard-coal burning in “Development of the Locomotive Engine”. (Once it ‘gets going’, of course, there’s all kinds of fun … but it takes a long time in the absence of forced draft which of course he didn’t have.)
The icing on the cake is ‘firebrick in the arch’ fusing. I suspect that the firebars in the grate would have melted long before any particular effect of combustion gas plume heat on the firebrick came to be noted.
Of course those of us who actually know something about firing know that if he had too much heat even with the injector on … he wouldn’t wait for it to ‘die down’; he’d just start dumping sections of the grate (and presumably building up a new fire using regular coal on those sections, progressively). Of course this might lead to some comical ashpan burnout, frantic raking-out to the sides, amusing tie fires and the like, but it defies rationality to think that uncontrolled overheating would be tolerated for any length of time by a professional fireman.
After the War, in the Forties, we heated with Coke, Hot Water heat, and in summer, when Coke Furnace shut down, heated tap water w Coal in a small water heater plumbed in adjacent.
Interlake Steel’s coke battery was not too far from our house and abutted Torrence Avenue. I remember that an RS3 and some small GE industrials were assigned to it. The small pushers used to move the coke from the oven to the quenching tower were small 4-wheel beasts with tall cabs to see over the coke car.
NDG-- Thank you for all that. I recall those days very well, but in Hamilton, not Montreal, same darn thing though. My Dad, in addition to his day job selling furniture off the floor at Adams Furniture ( remember them… British ’ Great Universal Stores GUS’ ) he was the superintendent of a 16 unit 4 floors apartment building, where we lived in apartment #1. So he looked after the big boiler there, and I frequently went with him. All those pipes and accessories wrapped in asbestos! They converted to oil mid fifties. Now that was a big ‘furnace’ door and it looked like Dantes Inferno inside and the fire maelstrom went on forever into the distance, at least to me anyway.
The attached SunCoke video which is ‘today and now’ really shows how little the process have changed in producing coke, but it is a lot more environmentally friendly. This is true of everything in Mining, Milling, Smelting and Refining.
Overmod-- Quite right. I do have good access, we have 3 Organic Chemists here, 2 of them with Masters, and I’ve already fired off emails and texts. As for me, I’m a VMS geologist ( Volcanogenic Massive Sulphides) , a ‘Greenstone Guy’ and when I took Organic Chemistry the Oil Sands pretty much consisted of folks standing around watching the Bitumen bubbling up wondering what the heck is going on here.
Will get an answer, get to the bottom of this, however I have a hunch you’re theory of proprietary secrets are at least a part of it.
Is Sinclair’s Development of the Locomotive Engine a good book for a person interested in the technical aspects of the steam locomotive to read? Published in 1907, it is missing out on the large firebox tech of the 1920s? Does it get into superheating and the cylinder wall condensation effect?
I think you are wondering if the gassy portion would be used in diluent. Degassing would produce methane, ethane, propane, and butane. The analysis of the Endbridge dilutent had little butane and was about 96% heavier hydrocarbons, although the light end of liquid crudes. The petcoke would come from the bitumen portion of the dilbit.
Further to my last note, the dilutent is added to the heavy bitumen to make it a pumpable liquid for handling. The mixing does not change the individual hydrocarbon components. The dilutent is separated out at the refinery.