I wonder if Richard Trevithick (1771-1833) who built the first steam engine tramway locomotive, on February 22, 1804, thought that his engine was too big and unwieldy? It weighed five tons, its boiler was eight foot long and four foot in diameter. It could hit 4 miles an hour BUT it was able to haul a load of 10 tons of iron, 70 men and five extra wagons 9 miles.
In The Guardian Wednesday 26 August 2009
"A century old record has been broken after Inspiration, a twin-finned car that looks like a prop from Thunderbirds, achieved an average speed of 139.84mph on two runs over a measured mile, at Edwards Air Force Base, California. That may not sound fast when a car has already broken the sound barrier, but this was a steam car, and the record for this type of machine was set in 1906, at an average of 127.7mph.
The British car, with British born driver Charles Burnet III at the wheel, reached a maximum of 151.085mph, a speed greater than the 145.6mph recorded in 1985 by Steamin' Demon, a car designed by Jim Crank of California and driven by Richard Barber along the Bonneville Salt Flats."
Coincidentally there is a video of steam-driven vehicles at http://archive.org/details/BeslerCo1932 by the Besler Corporation Promo Film: Steam-Driven Vehicles] (ca. 1932-1933)!
After the 1973 global oil crisis, the Swedish automaker Saab developed an innovative nine-cylinder axial steam-car design that used electronic controls to improve efficiency and reduce the size and weight of the boiler, and added a compressed-air pump to speed up acceleration. The car used only miniscule amounts of fuel to heat the boiler and generated almost no greenhouse gas emissions. But after the oil market stabilized in the 1980s, the Saab steamer never got off the drawing board. In the 1990s, German researchers came up with a low-emissions engine design, the ZEE, that used ceramic cylinder linings instead of oil as a lubricant.
The point of the above being that even steam engines can be technologically advanced to compete with the modern petrol engine, so...
OK, I know a steam engine is a more reactive and portable kind of engine than a gravity powered engine seems to be, but don't be so keen to rule out technological advances. We don't even have a working model of a Besslerwheel yet, and we have no idea of its potential.
I envisage an Besslerwheel engine mounted on gimbals to allow it maintain its vertical axis, what ever direction it is heading and at what ever angle to the horizontal. Reduce its height and compensate by lengthening it. In a previous post, I suggested mounting several wheels on one axle, but in fact it might be possible to design it to have one of each weight, whose horizontal length is increased to the length of the wheel's width. So in effect you have squashed down wheel and made it much, much wider. There may be ways of shaping the weights or altering the levers to gain further mnechanical advantage.
And such an engine might be used to generate electricity to drive the vehicle.
Yes this is pure speculation, but don't dismiss it as a possibility; we won't know what it will be capable of until we have one to develop.
JC
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