OK, Howard et al, whoever might be interested - from a previous thread, a conceptual sketch of a couple concepts for an oil burner for a small firebox that can be mounted in the middle of the firepan and atomize in a circular pattern. This is a nonvaporizing burner to make use of waste oil of varying consistencies and clanliness, unlike the very good vaporizing burners in use in the UK and elsewhere that are fussy about oil quality.

Hope this goes through OK.

dave

Geez that got huge. Went through OK otherwise.

No idea if the one with the oil running up the center and drooling out over a steam slot would work better than the one that brings the oil up in front of a series of steam holes.

Anybody who wants to play with this is welcome to do so, provided they share their experience with this board.

dave

It looks like a variation of the Von Borden-Ingles burned developed by on the Southern Pacific by those two men. I'm sure it is workable.

Looks like a few of the various old sludge burners.

Looks more like a part out of the heating boilers my dad works with, although it is most likely larger. I can't help but be impressed that there is striking similarities to oil-burning technology in heating applications.

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Dave, thanks for posting this. It will be a while before we get to playing around with it though.

Howard P.

Tom, of course at least one is - if you took the VBI and turned it into a circle, which was the take-off point. The other is a cross between that and the FEC flame thrower combined with some industrial stuff........

I'm thinking that the steamcentric burner might have a tenency to blow the fuel back down the pipe with too much atomizing pressure, kind of thinking out a slightly different arrangement.

Kelly, Bob and Eric were pleased to convert to solid fuel but neither ever even suggested to me it was due to a failure of the burner. A LOT of wood became available at minimal cost, and it was historically accurate. The overnight boiler heating system failed, though, as I recall it was located lower than the boilers and sucked the hot water out of them into the basement.

Thanks.

dave

Dave, Do you want me to list the design considerations of burners?

Please do share whetever insights you have on this or any technical subject, Nigel. I know you've done a lot of research and development on them. Sizing burners is of interest - I recently reread a study done for the Ffestiniog by an engineer who designed the burner system for the Romney who used 3 different methods of sizing the burners, and came up with very different results each time. Also, his approach was in finding an alternative to the Laidlaw - Drew burner which he found "hard on boilers" on other locomotives. His proposal looked a lot like stationary hardware to me.....and i recall that Welsh Highland and Ffestiniog developed a nice vaporizer themselves so they must not have liked the proposal I read.

I'm hoping this thread will become a good conversation about this subject - anybody with good information or an intelligent question should feel free to add.

dave

A burner must include the following

The fuel must include fuel heating to vaporise it. There are three ways to introduce the heat. Heating the fuel to the burner. Hot steam for atomisation. External heat from the firebox.

The burner must aslo atomise the fuel. You can spray it using a pump like a diesel injector. By steam with either impinging it on a surface like in a lempor mixing chamber or Meshing where you have alternatly jets of fuel and oil.

A Laidlaw drew burner has a fuel consuption for a 1.25 inch burner of 50 UK gallons per hour.

The burner you show is just a crude virsion of a hevey oil wier burner with external atomising. It although is the baisis of a laidlaw drew burner but with much refinement.

The vaporizing is a problem for those of us who burn whatever is the cheapest nasty waste oil available - which is why I'm trying to base a central burner design on the Van Boden flame thrower, which will atomize just about anything from jet fuel to Bunker C (provide the Bunker C is heated to flow, not to vapor). Heating dirty oil to vaporization leaves the dirty byproducts as sludge in the burner, clogging it.......which can really ruin your day if you're out on the road with a trainload of unhappy passengers and no bathrooms on the train.

As waste oil technology grows cleaner and it becomes less available and more costly due to wider market, we'll be seeking an even broader range of fuel oils, so unless we can find a way to cleanly vaporize gunky oil along with its byproducts and make it burn in locomotive forebox temperatures and variable rates of combustion........we need a lower tech but more forgiving design.

Maybe a vaporizer seperate from the burner, easy to keep clean?

dave

From the fuel tank the supply is gravity to the valve. From there if its a weir burner type which is what you drew then there is no vacuum on the fuel. If you apply heating to the fuel before the burner above its vaporising point you will get cavitating and an intermitant flame. If you heat the fuel you just want to achive a temprature just bellow its flash point. You need to atomise the fuel before you can get good vaporisation ( like the little balls of fuel) so the atomising process must ocurr before you vaporise the fuel and if the burner applies a vacuum to the fuel pipe it will avoid the cavitations in the fuel supply. The heat from the atomising steam must be suficent to vaporise the fuel. It is then that you can eject the fuel as a mist for good combustion. I can not see where a pre-vaporiser would be a benifit. It would be just as hard to care for as some burner parts.

You talk of bad types of fuel. Firstly you have to apply greater technology to these to maintain an even distribution and good combustion. The enviromental people are getting tougher about such fuels. It is now almost a legal requirement to have waste oils cleaned before burning. I am prity sure that some of the people I used to know at FR are no more due to health problems from such fuels.

Interesting - I'm starting by looking for a simple technology since in my experience only simple stuff can handle a variety of dirty fuel conditions. Please tell us more about the greater technology for dealing with the problem.

Yes, I think we could distill the dirty stuff and condense out cleaner fuel, but then we'd be refineries, and certainly not on the locomotive would be the place to do so. I'm probably confused by having seen the development work done at Ffestiniog / WHRR by a talented young guy called David who's last name I can't recall, and who had equipped burners with a vaporizing coil to convert the fuel to vapor before being injected into the firebox. I have no idea how well this worked out. I do have some better idea about the burner that runs a cylindrical stream of superheated steam along the burner column, picking up fuel from a central core through holes in the column sides in the process, and being thrown out radially by a curved flange at the top. Whether this included some form of vaporization I have no idea. I was told it needed a pretty reliable standard of clean fuel.

The locomotive I saw using it in service was a tiny 0-4-0T with a Nathan 5 chime whistle.....I'm still half deaf. Grate area about the size of an American dining room chair cushion.

dave