Has he pitched this idea to the President yet? He could get billions...............

Skip the batteries and go with a fireless, thermos bottle design.

Stretching here, but I bet the battery link is a way to use wind/solar power?

Try this:

Solar array heating a stationary boiler. Stationary boiler feeding fireless thermos bottle. If the thermos were tight enough and insulated, you could punch it up to 1000 psi x high temp and maybe you could get some mileage out of the engine.

If he had any intentions of using solar or wind power, he didn't tell me. As far as I know, it would be charged from an external source for fire-up and initial start-off, and would charge itself en route either through a form of dynamic breaking or through an electric generator connected to the wheels.

[quote="Mark Z. Yerkes
and would charge itself en route either through a form of dynamic breaking or through an electric generator connected to the wheels.[/quote]

OK....perpetual motion. Let me know how it works out.

dave

Your friend could write a good paper on natural gas (CNG or LNG) fired locomotives. BN did this awhile back with (2) SD-40s and a tank car. With NYMEX prices below $2.00/MMBTU for pipeline gas the technology is worth another look from academia.

Rube Goldberg and His Perpetual Motion Machine meets Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive. Dynamic braking and/or a dynamo on the axle to charge the batteries brings us back to a simple battery/electric and the boiler and cylinders have become superfluous.

What I am envisioning is a modern Vulcan Duplex built on a Geep or RS frame with the cab moved somewhat more toward the center. The tender/short hood is the battery pack, possibly with a small APU for charging and supplementary air. The long hood/boiler is a thermos bottle similar to that on a fireless with the heating elements added. The primary charging circuit for the batteries is solar panels. If the application permits it these can be mounted on a frame similar to the gravel guards seem on some quarry engines. Otherwise they will be whereever the unit ties up. If we take the battery pack and APU one step farther then it is a modular unit which is interchangeable with the battery packs and gensets used in the latest designs of hybrid.

The problem to be solved here is not the technology. We have that and I daresay that among the regulars here that we have the capability to design and build the contraption. (I suspect that two of you just ducked behind shop machinery, another started mentally going over a list of investors and that yet another would like me to send him a bottle of whatever I was serving at the cocktail hour...) The real problem to be solved is the economics of using a hot water circuit to convert the battery power to tractive effort. If our scholar can resolve those issues then I want to build the thing in a scale larger than 7½ inch gage.

Imagine what might have happened if Peter Cooper had submitted his original proposal for the Tom Thumb on this forum...

GME

OK....perpetual motion. Let me know how it works out.

dave[/quote]

How did that in any way imply perpetual motion? Diesels and hybrid cars both use the methods I mentioned, why is it hard to picture that on a steam locomotive. This was a serious question; I'd appreciate serious responses or none at all.

It was that bit about the locomotive "would charge itself en route either through a form of dynamic braking or through an electric generator connected to the wheels." As phrased in that manner, it suggests the generator is being used continuously to recharge the batteries. A better choice in wording would have been to say the batteries "would recharge in a form of dynamic braking through a generator connected to the wheels."

Notice the two emboldened words suggest either you are using dynamic braking, or that you will have the generator running continuously to recharge the batteries. That sort of thing is why English teachers strain to emphasize clear writing. Goofs such as that can leave you open to wise cracks.

Don't feel bad. Everybody flubs up that way at least some of the time, including me. I'm perhaps more sensitive to this than most, because as an auditor I have to write reports on my clients all the time, and I have to make sure supervisors 310 miles away can see what I saw on the job. I won't go into detail here, but I can tell you some things I've seen are so crazy, they are hard to believe, much less describe, but describe them is something I have to do!

In my case, I also shortened the sentence a bit, making it a bit easier to read. And again, don't feel too bad about that, either. Take my word for it, it's harder to write short than to write long; I would bet that two writers here, Becky Morgan and Kelly Lynch, would agree with that assessment.

Anyway, you and your friend have fun--and don't let minor digs like that get to you, here or anywhere else!

Have you spoken with your friend yet about this? What has he said, if anything, about what you're seeing here?

I did not mean to imply that the batteries would be constantly charged, and if it came out that way, that is my fault. I was comparing the generator idea to how the electric motor in a hybrid is charged while the car is in motion by the movement of the gas motor. I suppose I should've just left it at dynamic braking.

I have not yet discussed this further with my friend since he is a senior this year and is already well into the project he picked (some kind of device on a trailer that converts used vegetable oil into a form that can be used in the bus on our campus that runs off of said oil). This idea will most likely never get out of the "idea" stage; I just wanted to see what others thought.

Mark,

When I read your comment, I started to write a message about how that would be perpetual motion. But then I started to think more about what you are proposing, and I cannot conclude that it would be perpetual motion because you are starting with a charge of power. And you did not claim that the generator alone would sustain a battery charge. In a way, what you described is not different than a vehicle with gas engine, generator, batteries, and drive motors. And dynamic braking can indeed re-capture energy that would otherwise be lost. So that feature has nothing to do with perpetual motion.

The only part that sounds like perpetual motion is driving a generator off of the wheels (not in a dynamic braking mode). If you simply drove a generator off the vehicle drive train or wheels, it would charge the batteries, but it would use battery power at the same time. So there would be no benefit.

With a hybrid car, the benefit of running a gas engine to charge the batteries is that the engine can run very efficiently if it runs at a constant speed and output, which works fine for charging the batteries. Then the batteries and motors can vary the output to match the varying power needs of the vehicle.

An interesting tidbit: Steve Harrod (softwerkslex) suggested the idea of using a solar steam generator to charge a fireless locomotive. That idea was actually promoted for a while in the Sacramento area with something called the Solar Steam Train project. This was intended as a tourist operation of some sort, perhaps involved with the California State Railroad Museum there, but the website didn't mention any such connection. I'm afraid I can't confirm that project directly, as the site is apparently gone, but it does show up as a reference in a number of places, including Wikipedia (scroll down to "Fireless Locomotives"):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_steam_technology

While on the subject of fireless locomotives, apparently one is restored to operation, using compressed air. This is a Heisler-built rod engine at the Lake Shore Railway Historical Society in the town of North East, Pa.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voBKRe6V3tA

This little museum has a rather impressive-looking roster of equipment, most notably a decent-sized fleet of passenger cars.

http://www.grape-track.org/Roll

http://www.grape-track.org/home

Have fun.

Understandable. I realized upon typing out my previous comment that it wouldn't work the same like I thought it would. My apologies for lashing out on the original perpetual motion comment.