How does a steam locomotive work?
In: Engineering
boiler heats water to make steam.
steam has a greater volume than water, so it tries to expand.
This expansion pushes into a piston and forces it up. when the piston is full, it is disconnected from the boiler and connected to a colder cylinder which forces it to condense, which decreases its volume, forcing the piston to contract.
This makes linear motion, use an offset pin on the wheel to make linear motion into rotation, then that pushes on the tracks to go back to linear
In a steam locomotive you’ve got a few things going on all at the same time.
First, you’ve got a big hot fire, in the old days fed by coal. Nowadays steam units still in existence have been converted to oil or something easier to manage.
Anyway, that fire is inside a boiler. The boiler has a whole bunch of pipes snaking throughout it. Water flows through those pipes and is heated into highly pressurized steam.
That steam is piped into a couple of large piston chambers which push a piston and a connecting rod connected to a wheel, and suddenly you have motion.
The water cannot be recovered. In the early days of railroading a steam engine couldn’t go very far without replenishing its water tank. That’s one reason a lot of small towns popped up along rail lines every 20/30/40 miles.
The big round cylinder at the front is a giant water tank.
Behind that is the coal oven that heats the water to make steam in that tank.
As steam forms, the tank pressurizes. So the engineer uses a serious of valves to regulate how much pressure is held in the tank.
Those valves also let the pressure leave the tank and go through pipes to where it can be used to do mechanical work by pushing a piston.
That piston is connected through a linkage to the drive wheels of the train. When the piston moves, the wheel spins.
The awesome thing about pistons is how efficiently they can multiply pressure making them incredibly powerful.
It goes.
Chuff.
Chuff. Chuff
Chuff chuff chuff chuff chuff chuff chuff chuff chuff chuff chuff chuff.
Wooooooooo Woooooooooooo
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