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Show THE TURBINE ENGINE. It surely looks as though the steam engine was about to become obsolete. The coming force or rather the force that has come, is electricity, and the agents to generate the force are about to be reduced to falling water and the steam turbine. tur-bine. A fine aiticle on the turbine is in the current cur-rent Review of Reviews. The extreme limit of the steam engine has about been reached. The greatest achievement is in some of the German trans-Atlantic liners The Kaiser Wilhelm has 40,000 horsepower, which drives the great ship at the rate of 22 or 23 knots per hour, but the old Cunard company is building two turbine ships that will be each of 00,000 horsepower and it is expected that they will cross the Atlantic at the rate of 25 knots per hour from pier to pier, or in 5 days and 8 hours. Then the motion of a steam engine is not steady; no crank motion can ever be equal all the way round. This fact gives large engines a great deal of vibration and when 25,000 horsepower engines are driving a ship at full speed the vibrations are most disturbing to ordinary nerves. All this is avoided in ships driven by turbines. Theirs Is a perfectly rotary motion and without jar. Then there will be an immense saving in the space required for them, IBB they are altogether less complicated in construe- 99S tion, and finally it is claimed that where tried on , SBH land they consume one-third less fuel than the 1 mBB steam engine consumes. They are swiftly com- H ing into general use Their advantages over HH the steam engine seem to be (1) a saving in jBB cost; (2) a saving in space; (3) less cost for SIB repairs; (4) absence of vibration; (5) less Ha- v fll bllity to accidents; (G) great saving in fuel. flfl We think it would be a good scheme for our bH city authorities, before bargaining for a new fll lighting plant to write to Milwaukee to the Allis fl works and get estimates for a turbine plant of 1 sufficient power to do all that is required and see if it would not be economy for the city to build its own plant. We are not sure but it would H be economy for every business block to establish an independent plant of its own. They are now 91 running in many places in the East, in Europe B and South Africa and one American-built turbine driving electric motors to operate a manufactur- M ing plant has carried a 33 per cent overload jfl steadily without apparent harm. That is equiv- M alent to making a thirty horsepower engine do a forty horsepower engine's work. Again, there be- M ing no internal lubrication used in a turbine, the M condensed steam goes untainted by oil to the tank and can be used over and over in the boil- M ers They only require one-third the space of a M steam engine of the same capacity. There is not H half the danger of break-downs that the steam H engine is subject to, not nearly as much knowl- B edge needed to handle the engine as the steam H engine requires. It is an old principle, but the H efficiency given it now makes it one more miracle iH that science has performed. U |
