DIY Micro Steam Powerplant

[@HyperspacePirate]

For those wondering, nothing exciting happens when the tank runs out of water. Because there's such a large flow restriction and the propane is gaseous, it basically just looks like a small pilot flame coming out of the turbine outlet, even when it's been superheated by the burner.

[@associatedblacksheepandmisfits]

❤ Nice flash steam unit , they were very popular with full size cars and model racers,both cars and boats on a tether. How about trying a tesla turbine, with plenty insulation 😊

[@mxcollin95]

@@associatedblacksheepandmisfitsI was thinking the same thing but after thinking about it a little more I think the Tesla turbine would probably have to be heated to a high temp to avoid condensation from occurring inside the turbine otherwise the condensation may spoil the Tesla turbine from working as intended. Any thoughts space pirate???

[@alexrogers777]

that's exactly what I was wondering, thanks

[@charliemopps4926]

could the water possibly back-pressure into the propane? I'm thinking, if something went wrong up my the turbine. Maybe put a pressure release valve between the propane tank and the water tank slightly above the pressure of the propane so that if there is some weird back-pressure event, it'll blow the relief valve instead of putting ice into your propane tank.

[@pauloneill9880]

Has the potential of a beautiful thermobaric device with enough negligence. 😄👍

[@ogiego298]

using the propane to pressurise the water feels like a CSB investigation waiting to happen.

[@Rizzler420-uh4yd]

Hahaha

[@notamouse5630]

As an engineer in the comments, I say this needs to be monitored by the engineer that makes it, it needs a secondary vessel with a shutoff valve from the main propane tank, and needs a low pressure or drop in pressure automatic shutoff valve from the secondary tank to the capillary for the event of capillary failure. Shutoff Valve should have an alarm and should trigger a secondary valve to shutoff the main tank. And that might be the minimum and you shall not take that as full advice.

[@Pants4096]

The title writes itself: "Designed to fail... SPECTACULARLY!"

[@zerumsum1640]

Yeah, this needs a float valve in the tank or something that closes once the water's gone, or a way to keep tabs on the water level. As a "Should i invest more time in this?" test though it's not horrible for a initial test for a proof of concept. certainly it's a lot safer than a pressurized tank boiler.

[@Sun2Gway]

@@notamouse5630 in order words, DIY and Powerplant should not BE in the same sentence.

[@khlorghaal]

"i can squeeze it until my fingers burn and it still keeps running. it seems to have some power behind it." superb measurement

[@cpearmain]

Yup - I love his "90% is good enough" approach to developing ideas, along with his willingness to admit to his cockups. Great stuff.

[@urugulu1656]

well it is not metric thus perfectly adequate for an american (yes i know he used metric for part of his measurements - its a joke...)

[@dsfs17987]

added benefit of using propane to pressurize water is when you run out of water, you can start generating some real power, for a while... 😁

[@testboga5991]

*for a while*

[@tonyromano833]

Sound a bit dangerous… 💥🧐

[@fluffsquirrel]

Went from steam-powered to propane-powered to where did my house go?

[@jakewynn]

yeah surely he should have just pressurized a cylinder and used that to pressurize the water tank?

[@untildawncrepes]

"Steam Generator 1, designed to operate at 17 watts... went beyond 1750."

[@TheOriginalEviltech]

Invert the heating coil. You need the hottest part to be in contact with the steam to superheat it. Also insulate the burn pipe so all the heat stays in, and you only lose heat from the exhaust. You already know what to do with the turbine. Wind the heating coil on a piece of flat bar so the coils swirl and force all the hot gasses from the burner to swirl as much as possible and to deliver as much as possible heat to the steam.

[@josephbrown8905]

This. That's very wet steam coming out during the boiler test, before it even loses heat running the turbine. It should be entirely transparent, with no entrained water droplets. That boiler design also loses a lot of energy up the center of the coil, so I might suggest keeping the existing coil and adding a second, tighter coil that runs counterflow down the center of the first.

[@YodaWhat]

Good ideas, but can you provide a picture link or a less ambiguous description of how a flat bar coil form results in coil swirl?

[@Max24871]

Also recover the heat exiting the turbine by preheating the cold water

[@RGD2k]

​@@YodaWhat Picture the coil, wound on the bar maybe 5-10 times wider than it is thick: The coil, held tight, is following a rounded-rectangular rather than round cross section. Then, when you take it off the bar, each turn loosens a bit, and so the longer sections are no longer pointed quite the same way as for the next turn. Increase the effect by un-twisting it a bit more. This leaves the whole thing overall cylindrical again - now roughly the wider diameter of the flat bar, and going around like you draw a five-pointed star, only messier (bit like a spirograph). This distributes the tube across the inside of the pipe better, and will give the steam better contact with it.

[@YodaWhat]

@RGD2k - Thank you, that's a very helpful description. I was a bit confused for a reason that may become clear... That kind of helical coil will add a bit of very helpful turbulence to the combustion gas flow and perhaps to the steam flow, BUT it also reduces the total length of tubing, and that is undesirable. Unfortunately, it is not clear which effect will predominate and give best results. So instead... A slightly different approach which is still quite simple is to take a strip of sheet metal (not galvanized) that fits inside the round coil and twist it into a helix, then insert it into the coil, and the coil into the chimney pipe. That will slow down the flow of hot gas and make it pass diagonally over the tubing, which is a longer path... Very helpful. Also run some vertical wires (at least three, and about half the diameter of the tubing) on the outside of the coil to act as spacers between the tubing and the chimney pipe. That will ensure there are no cold spots where the tubing is pressed against the chimney. Another useful trick is to slightly pinch the copper tubing every little distance (about 5 to 10 times the tubing diameter), so that the internal shape and cross section is variable. That asymmetry forces the water/steam speed to vary and induces turbulence, which improves heat transfer. The depth of pinches should be about 1/4 of the tubing diameter: enough to create turbulence but not enough to seriously restrict the flow. A safety benefit of the pinches is that if any of them balloon back out to more of a round cross-section, you know you're operating too hot and/or at too much pressure _for that tubing._ IF you want to operate hotter and or at higher pressure, consider using cupro-nickel tubing with a relatively thick wall, or automotive steel brakeline tubing, and/or using more turns of smaller-diameter tubing, which is inherently better at resisting pressure.

[@arthurlee4323]

I think the most impressive part of this whole thing is that he designed the thing in CATIA which I think is the French’s secret plan to hold aerospace engineers back.

[@carstenpfundt]

You design a Porsche in solidworks You design the factory it's made in in CATIA.

[@Leo99929]

@@carstenpfundt I joined an automotive company that used AutoCAD for factory layouts and most engine part drawings. CATIA V5 for 3D CAD. The controls were just digital versions of how people used to use drawing boards. Presumably this made it popular since the people who used to use drawing boards could move over with little friction, but that software needs to die in a fire by modern standards. It's no longer intuitive because no one uses a drawing board anymore. Parametric modeling is WAY more efficient. And you can model the 3D thing, then the software makes the drawings from it, and updates them automatically as you change things. CATIA v5 was like Photoshop: 2000 hidden tools with no explanation on how they're used or where to find them, and they get hidden/move around just for extra "fun". Then 5 dialogue screens and 15 variables to do something simple. I've heard V6 is better, but I wouldn't know because the automotive industry is scared of progress and is still using software released 26 years ago. SolidWorks integrates FEA solutions into the CAD modeling capability short circuiting the design iteration loop enabling changes to be identified and implemented several times per day, rather than maybe once per month. This combined with the more intuitive and user friendly interface that only shows you the tools you can currently use and prioritizing the ones most likely to be used makes the design process so much faster and more efficient that CATIA is a joke in comparison... Having said this... SolidWorks also sometimes just tells you something is completely impossible for no apparent reason. But it actually is totally possible if you ask it to do it in another way. It's incredibly frustrating at times. I've been told CATIA is better with this, I have no evidence to say it isn't, but I still pick SolidWorks over CATIA V5 every time without hesitation. CATIA V5 wastes my time and I don't tolerate that.

[@Max24871]

So that's the program that looks almost but not quite like freecad. I never knew.

[@syriuszb8611]

​@@carstenpfundt I know for a fact, that ton of car design is in CATIA as well. At least plastic parts and some accessories. Plastic parts with design surfaces would be very hard to work on in different software than CATIA. Maybe there are alternatives now, but at least it was true for a long time.

[@oriolopocholo]

@@carstenpfundt lol factories are designed with good ol autocad

[@anon-means-anon]

These are exactly the type of projects that seem to grab my interest as well. I'm constantly making something horrendously inefficient and mostly useless, but it's fun and I learn a lot.

[@HuskyMachining]

Same here! I love screwing around in my shop making useless things

[@wazza33racer]

wet steam is visible, but super heated "dry steam" is transparent. At the peak of steam plant efficiency during WW2, the US Navy was getting 450psi from their boilers supplying dry steam to turbines.

[@CativaCookie]

That also had the horrifying side effect of steam leaks that could fataly injure you being transparent.

[@wazza33racer]

@@CativaCookie yes,there are indeed hazards.

[@aaronclair4489]

I believe some WW2 USN propulsion boilers were operating at 600psi, like on the Iowa class. Going from memory, most other countries were at 300-400psi, while Bismarck was around 900psi with some reliability issues.

[@ericlotze7724]

@@aaronclair4489i was reading up on Supercritical Steam Power Plants Seems like one of the “latest and greatest” forms (outside of nuclear) was the John W. Turk Jr. Coal Plant. From Wikipedia: “ the plant came online in 2012 as the first sustained "ultra"-supercritical coal plant in the United States, reaching boiler temperatures above 1,112 °F (600 °C) and pressures above 4,500 psi (310 bar)” Wild stuff. This is the stuff that will shred a broom used as a leak sensor I’ve heard, NOT most “dry steam” (which would just burn you to hell and back)

[@d3vitron779]

@@aaronclair4489Nimitz class carriers get up to 700# in their massive main steam systems

[@Gunbudder]

put your propane bottle in a big bucket of tap water. it will thermally stabilize the tank and prevent any freezing. the bigger the bucket, the more thermally stable it will become. usually though just a 5 gallon bucket of tap water is fine. it will provide super consistent gas pressure from the tank at any discharge rate. although if you go just full bore open, the nozzle itself will start to freeze and you will need to wrap it in a soaked towel to keep it from freezing

[@RGD2k]

This! the heat you need to keep the bottle from getting colder is at room temperature, so quite 'cheap' to get.

[@filonin2]

Must be how Hank Trill gets such a clean burnin' flame.

[@nommy8599]

You need to tie the bottle down or something to stop it floating, typing over and causing problems I imagine.

[@brianmason1849]

Have the excess steam condense around the tank keeping it warm and recycling some of the lost water/heat

[@tombradscott]

Why not use the propane to boil the water?😅😂

[@Palerider1942]

If you do more Steam stuff, move away from brass. the steam leeches the zink from th ebrass making the material brittle and porus and also puts zinc into the exhaust gases... Bronze is a good option to use if you dont want to do straight copper

[@gydo1942]

brass is widely used in model engineering and is perfectly fine to use. I've never heard of zinc being a problem

[@amosbackstrom5366]

Stolen shamlessly from AI overview: Dezincification, what it is: A corrosion process that removes zinc from brass, leaving behind copper When it occurs: When brass with more than 15% zinc is in contact with water How it looks: Mild dezincification may cause the surface to change color from yellow to pink. Severe dezincification can weaken brass and cause it to perforate. How it affects brass: Reduces the mechanical properties of brass and can lead to breakage How to resist dezincification: Add As (typically 0.02 - 0.25%) to alpha brasses, or add Sn (up to 1.5%) Sounds like a problem that can only happen using the wrong alloy of brass. Any brass fitting from the hardware store would be made with the right proportions of copper to zinc plus tin and arsenic and 11 herbs and spices. [Edit] ok now I see he used his own brass casting. So it's definitely a good idea to test its composition and make sure it's not susceptible to this type of leaching.

[@jeffspaulding9834]

@@amosbackstrom5366 I'd have to go back and check, but I believe his casting was copper, not brass.

[@Gnomebitten]

@@gydo1942 it depends on the alloy. High zinc alloys are more subject to selective leeching than others. Some model engineers stay way from it, but a lot of models don't have the runtime on live steam for it to actually affect anything. For a toy like this the actual concern is having propane pressurize the water line feed without some kind of shutoff to keep propane from entering the flash boiler lmao

[@AlexanderSalas-l6f]

Ohh shut up

[@yamm7937]

unpredictable and informative. just what i like

[@HL65536]

Some simple efficiency optimizations: Converging diverging nozzle-like optimization can be done quite easily: just use a cone shape at the end, it's not the perfect shape but a lot better than a hole. The size is easy to calculate: the pressure ratio is equal to the flow area ratio, e.g. 9 bar -> 1 bar means outer diameter is 3x hole diameter. Next point of optimization is the boiler flow direction: steam exit should be on the flame side, water input should be at the exhaust side. This acts as a heat exchanger and extracts more heat from the flame. The turbine exhaust can further be used to pre-heat the water in another heat exchanger. Test the steam output temperature, it should be a lot higher than 100°C, this also increases efficiency. Add a bit of insulation onto the flame pipe. Maybe even put another tube around it and let the combustion air run through it to pre-heat it. For the schottky diodes, you should use bigger ones and have them run hot ~100°C. That makes them way more efficient.

[@TheOriginalEviltech]

You seem to know your stuff quite well! What do you do for work/fun so you are this well informed?

[@HL65536]

@@TheOriginalEviltech I am a black hole sucking up endless STEM knowledge. I like watching 2 hours deep dive videos into some technical subject and remember most of it. Just don't ask me to remember people's names...

[@TheOriginalEviltech]

@@HL65536 haha, same here! Not allot of people like us!

[@game-tea]

​@@TheOriginalEviltechidk this channel seems pretty big to me

[@Yaivenov]

​@@HL65536My brother!!! 😅

[@B0BBYL33J0RD4N]

A way that you might be able to mess with tolerances could be spray paint. Add a layer, see if it is better. Add another layer, see if it is better. Would have to get some heat resistant paint, and would want to point it at something that isn't going to die when a paint chip inevitably cascades into all of the paint coming off and out the end of the tube in .01 seconds as a shrapnel cannon, but is plenty well within the safety level of the rest of the channel.

[@notamouse5630]

Or do it more properly with brush electroplating.

[@montey1017]

Industrial power gen guy here. 2 kinds of turbine plants, single stage and multi stage. Single stage turbines burn just the gas. Literally a reconfigured airplane or helicopter motor, with a shaft output. Multi stage units will have multiple turbines on one shaft, with couplings between them. The first stage burns the gas, then boils water, used in the other turbines. Hydrogen cooled windings in the alternator, power plant type stuff.

[@Xsiondu]

Oh papi! Tell me more about hydrogen cooled windings in the alternator. You know how I love it

[@Xsiondu]

But seriously that sounds really interesting I would love to hear more

[@AlexBesogonov]

@@Xsiondu Large power plants use hydrogen to cool the generators. It has large volumetric specific heat capacity, and low viscosity compared to something like nitrogen. Some plants now use de-ionized water, but it has its own set of problems.

[@besenyeim]

So, all the turbines drive a single generator? Aren't there more independent modules (1turbine+1generator) in use?

[@paradiselost9946]

um? theres impulse turbines, such as delavals, and theres reactions, such as parsons. both can be multistaged... curtiss is a staged version of delaval, for much lower peripheral velocities, and a heron aka aelopile is a single stage reaction... and about the only existing example of one. problem here is he seems to have both types confused, and appears to have no idea about either...

[@justinpower8232]

Adding the coil increases the pressure drop of the water, decreasing the flow. Your water flow was most likely significally under the 1g/s you measured at first. You also need to take into account the steam pressure at the exit point, which lowers your pressure differential. So your efficiency is higher than calculated! To get the real flow rate, you need to test the circuit with the coil and with an output container at a pressure close to the steam pressure!

[@connordow7366]

I second this.

[@justinpower8232]

Alternatively, he could also condense the steam exiting the turbine to measure the flow rate, which would be much simpler

[@connordow7366]

@@justinpower8232 nice to see people usin them brain wrinkles. good idea.

[@CollectiveSoftware]

You just never know what you're going to get with this guy except that it's going to be awesome and dangerously inadvisable

[@oskarejsmont]

Check out organic rankine cycle. It is sort of low temperature steam engine in which instead of water you use some refrigerant which is easier to seal and you can get it running at pretty much any temperatures given you have enough delta T for any carnot efficiency. I think positive displacement vane turbine is way to go - some car ac compressors can be converted for turbine use - only issue is lack of vane springs but you can feed some gas inside vane slots to spread them for initial seal because once it is running centrifugal force will take care of it. Smaller issue is need to pump liquid refrigerant at pressure higher than high side pressure - this looks like modified gear pump job.

[@mikafoxx2717]

You just know he's gonna put propane in it.

[@InductorMan]

Always love watching your stuff! A couple comments/questions. First just want to point out that the efficiency of a motor as a generator typically isn't the same percentage at a given RPM/current operating point. The resistive drop is in the same direction as the EMF for a motor, but opposite/subtractive for a generator. This means that if a motor is 50% efficient at a given RPM and current, it will be 0% efficient as a generator at the same RPM and current (the terminal voltage will be zero; if we apply 2V/1A when motoring with 1V EMF and 1V resistive drop across 1 ohm winding resistance = 50% efficient, then the same RPM will produce 1 amp only if the external resistance is 0 and the entire EMF is applied across the 1 ohm internal resistance = 0% efficient). This is only strictly true for resistive motor impedance, if there's inductance (which is especially apparent with BLDC/PMAC motors) then things are a little bit different. Inductance is what I think we're seeing when we see that flat topped current/load curve you showed. If the generator had a purely resistive impedance, we probably shouldn't be seeing that: I am really not 100% sure on this btw, I guess there are cases where the torque curve of the turbine and the impedance of the motor could conspire to make the curve have a constant current characteristic. But what I think we may be seeing here is leakage inductance. As the load resistance decreases, the stator poles tend to reject more and more of the field through the windings (Lenz's law) and squeeze it back out into the pole face/rotor air gap area. There is a fixed amount of current that it takes to exclude basically all the field, and reduce the terminal voltage to zero, regardless of speed. From an electrical perspective even though the EMF may increase with increasing rotor speed, the impedance of the leakage inductance also increases, leaving current fixed. Although I think this is less intuitive than thinking about Lenz's law and flux exclusion. High pole count BLDC motors tend to actually have really bad leakage inductance (look how short of a gap and how much area there is between each adjacent pole face/shoe compared to the actual pole area: it's a substantial fraction, really not terribly hard to push all the field back out of the pole windings and force it to traverse the air from one pole face to another). In order to get more juice out of the motor one would need a field oriented controller, to drive an externally imposed and correctly phased voltage across the leakage inductance, in order to drive more current through the generator's internal EMF. One could test if this is what's happening by shorting the rotor and spinning it at various RPMs: if the current quickly tops out at 3A even while the RPM massively increases, then we're seeing leakage inductance. Another topic entirely: I'm really not clear on the theory of these turbines you have made. How are they letting the steam expand? It feels like after the steam is done interacting with the first scoop, it wants to get the heck out of the way, but in this design it has to go all the way around to the exit hole before it can do that. I would have thought that this turbine would want to act as a Pelton wheel: we expand the steam all the way to atmospheric pressure in the nozzle, converting all of the energy to kinetic energy, then we redirect the momentum of the steam with the moving scoop, and hopefully slow it down to a much lower velocity by moving it from the outer radius of the scoop to the inner radius (the scoop periphery and steam have to be moving at similar velocities, or at least not a factor of 100 different in other words). Then, after this one interaction, doesn't the steam want to just leave? In a Pelton wheel we make no effort to seal the wheel: we want the low velocity spent fluid to exit the sides and just get out of the way so the wheel doesn't inadvertently reaccelerate it. This design seems over-sealed. It seems like maybe the jet of steam is having to fight all the gas that's in the rest of the scoops and the housing, because it has to compress that fluid or push it past the scoops to the exit in order to make room for it. And although the path past the multiple scoops to the exit looks vaguely like a Tesla valve, so maybe there's an impetus for the gas to go one way around the rotor rather than the other, I would think that a substantial fraction of the gas would try to go around the "back side" of the rotor (from the inlet to the outlet the short way around) and actively fight the rotor. All of this is to say that it seems like maybe some large area outlets around the central shaft of the wheel, or even just huge outlets on one or both faces that leave the wheel completely open, might be an interesting thing to try. I really don't know, maybe the more enclosed thing you're doing has advantages in higher torque or something. Maybe enclosing the wheel more could reduce drag of the unused portions of the wheel on the atmosphere ... see Tom Stanton's "micro pelton turbine" video, where I think he may have erred in the opposite direction (wheel too open, acts as a fan on the air around it when it approaches theoretical optimum operating speed). This turbine just doesn't seem to fit the pattern of turbiney things I've seen before. I really want to say explicitly that this is all meant to be constructive, and I really am impressed by the stuff you do! For example the cryocooler series. Having tried to get heat "to go where I wanted it to go" in a couple of home and work projects I can start to appreciate the difficulty of the goals you set yourself, and it's really neat to watch someone persist until they've solved such a tough problem!

[@arjovenzia]

I think I understood about 60-70% of that. Which I'm actually kinda chuffed at. But thank you for your brain dump. Proper geeking out channels are the best comments. Thank you for your time at the keyboard.

[@ericweiss8264]

Well said. I thought the same. I love this channel but our man needs to do some more thinking about the expansion of gas performing work on a rotor

[@jetthardin4927]

I think people that actually understand electromagnets have to be stupid smart, it feels like whenever someone brings up flux or inductance I gotta bend my mind 45° to try and comprehend them

[@tx5brent]

I like how your design has an inherent audio, visual, thermal and potentially percussive indicator for when you run out of water

[@gaborbata8588]

No-name air tools could be a cheap enough source for those vane motors to experiment with, a drill or a grinder maybe -- you already get air connection, and a chuck as a coupling. Great project! Everybody should learn about these, given how much steam has advanced humanity, and still does to this day.

[@vylbird8014]

Dental drill. They are autoclaveable, so there will be no plastic components that would melt.

[@gaborbata8588]

@@vylbird8014 Thanks, I didn't realize this aspect of dental tools, good to know. Hopefully they don't use thermoplastics in workshop tools either, but I was thinking flat vanes would be easy to replace if needed. The high rpm and low torque of pneumatic tools might be a bigger problem to match a generator.

[@leonmusk1040]

@@gaborbata8588 You can use a planetary gearbox from a broken drill driver to swap rpm for torque or vice versa and with a coupla rubber bands and a few spot welds can also make a tool changing head for scala arms to use bitset bits with the quick release so it can assemble parts using the planetary gearset when your done. Swap two of the second gear planetary gears onto firsts webbing case with two washers rubber docking rings for lambs tails work best to tension the bit into locker side the two smaller gears become the insertion side and smaller gears lock it in place in the quick release groove.

[@joshuadelisle]

Fun fact. The average highly engineered steam locomotive is only 3% efficient... Great video. Cheers J

[@KingJellyfishII]

locomotives are pretty inefficient as they are designed for high power and low weight. on the other hand, massive compound steam engines can reach impressive efficiencies of 26%

[@user60521123]

The rotor should’ve been turned on a lathe first to ensure it will spin smoothly. Very interesting project! Very creative design!!

[@PiotrMichniewski]

I've already seen the video on Patreon but your impeccable ad delivery made me watch it again

[@Scrogan]

For the variable load, I’d recommend putting the load resistor below the FET’s source instead of above its drain. That will provide some negative feedback when you’re adjusting its gate voltage, making it more linear. I’d also probably use a multiturn pot.

[@seanscon]

Freeze guy is back

[@Jupiter-rs4zl]

Where? Edit: I read this as black 14 hours ago, lol

[@multiarray2320]

*Boil guy is back

[@ThylineTheGay]

@@multiarray2320 state change guy is back

[@yasirrakhurrafat1142]

Soldering instead of brazing guy is back.

[@seanscon]

@@ThylineTheGay good one.

[@MSP_TechLab]

1:20 that's why I always laugh when in the movie someone jumps in steam locomotive, throws a match in the firebox, and make it run immediately 😊

[@GerinoMorn]

Now that I think of it I'm sure Americans tried it in the 50s, but what if instead of a furnace we just exposed a nuclear fuel rod to the water in boiler... XD

[@TheTdw2000]

​@@GerinoMornI doubt you could power a train with the number of fuel rods you could stick into the boiler. Would be hilarious though.

[@maksrambe3812]

​@@TheTdw2000it would actually be roughly correct. A micro nuclear reactor is about the size of a train boiler and would output 1-20MW, which is enough for the most powerful electric locomotives in existence.

[@wabch]

@@GerinoMorn fuel rods dont generate heat on their own, a specially designed boiler would be needed.

[@arthurmoore9488]

@@wabch Huh? More like they don't generate large amounts of heat. Even then that's modern fuel rods and for certain definitions of "large amounts".

[@stewiex]

That was fan flippingtastic . It would be cool to see you try this again, but make the boiler and its components fit with inside a barbecue propane tank which is no larger, in fact, smaller than most household owned generators. There is also a method for generating steam using a solid metal core with holes drilled all over it to a certain depth which fits inside a tight tolerance pipe with water coming in one cap and out the other that will generate steam extremely efficiently. It would be neat if you could adapt this to a wind turbine to generate your steam instead of using propane . Perhaps some of the wasted steam potential could be captured with an air compressor to use that as your air pressure source. Keep up the awesome work with these really cool projects.

[@UniCrafter]

Pretty good, some potentially useful advice: 1. Place water inlet of the boiler at the exhaust end of the tube, and steam exit closest to the flame. This ensures the hottest/highest pressure steam. 2. Ensure the turbine is hot, water condensing on and around it limits its effectiveness 3. Cutting slots across the turbine between the tip and the housing should induce turbulence in the gas flow, which chokes gas from leaking around. 4. A multistage turbine should also increase efficiency quite a bit, ideally the exhaust velocity is next to zero as all momentum has been transferred. 5. Use the latent steam energy/heat to preheat the water going into the boiler. 6. Propane is great for experimenting like this, but modifying the design to run on wood could be pretty cool

[@phrozenwun]

The only steam engine build on youtube that I wanted to watch, good jerb!

[@BiscuitWaite]

It's the graphics that keep me coming back. Good stuff. Don't worry about the oopsie on the bolt hole, I've done it in manual and CNC, it happens. Usually only once, but it does happen. Nothin for nothin but if you're going to use a mill to mill off the bottom you do have to run an indicator over the surface and tappy tap it flat.

[@TheMLover]

Loved the Lost reference with the polar bear. Great content!

[@bsizzleton]

Currently sitting at the control panel of a 1200# 1mpph recovery boiler watching this! Love it!

[@nathanvanblommestein4316]

There's also lots of lost heat energy. You could collect the stem and use some kind of heat pump to pre heat the tank

[@vylbird8014]

That's called an economizers, they've been a common part of steam engines since the mid-1800s.

[@leomonk974]

2:14 using the pressure from your propane tank is genius, i mean all of your system is but that in particular i would never have thought of

[@josephschlesinger411]

You can virtually eliminate the diode voltage drop by using a full wave synchronous rectifier. That’s literally the mosfet circuit to drive it (but in reverse).

[@arthurmoore9488]

I believe you meant "magic." Or more accurately, "pain in the rear." Not that you're wrong. Just that I'm thinking of all the ways it can go wrong and how getting it working is a project in and of itself. Especially since I'd want some hardware safety in there to keep from dead shorting things.

[@FriendlyCynic]

16:10 Hair dryer. Throw it in like a plastic trash can, cut a hole at the top for the hair dryer, and one at the bottom for airflow and it shouldnt get above like 120F. Additionally, you can just open the lid more to control the temperature.

[@francistheodorecatte]

that steam is very wet; re-run the steam back through the boiler in a second loop to get it drier as dry steam is much more efficient.

[@paulmortellaro780]

Why not feed the cold water on the other end for a much more efficient counter flow system to create higher quality steam and extract more heat and increase power?

[@jasonburguess]

Your turbine needs needle bearings or a magnetic bearing to read the friction lost on the output shaft. Also look into hydraulic vane motors, they can be found at scrap yards easily, most power steering pumps are vane pump/motors. Very low tolerance and high efficiency. Love your videos!

[@davidtooley420]

18:14 It's the small pink silicone electronics that does it for me 😂

[@Rafael_Fuchs]

Thank you for pointing that out. It didn't even register the first time I seen it. Lmao

[@sargkookie3118]

I can say pretty confidently that a lot of people appreciate your content the same way I do. I would love to take the leap to do projects like these but can't justify the time or money and really enjoy seeing someone actually do it! So thank you!

[@mandrakejake]

You are the only youtuber I've seen using Catia!

[@JACK-wh6jl]

your productions are so flipping- down-to-Earth, straight-fwd, concise but full of details to "complete" ... yet not too-over-whelming😜😎 thanks for-all-you-do ! we have a group of ret engnrs... that gather & your site is one of only 8 we view & chit-chat about-it-all; you make "playing" enjoyable as-well-as informative; never too -old to learn & appreciate others'-creative -minds !👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻...

[@JonathanZigler]

You may get a better efficiency with a higher efficiency rectifier. You also might have had better luck with some bjts in a negative feedback config to create a stable voltage rail to minimize losses of the voltage dividers.

[@nuttyDesignAndFab]

regarding turbine efficiency: in order to get tight tolerances you want the housing and the turbine to have a taper to them, and have some way of adjusting the turbine axially so that you can get a really snug fit.

[@sethcain7434]

This dude loves capillary tubes!

[@mikafoxx2717]

Capillary tubes and propane, they put that shit in everything!

[@RichardBetel]

About the cold propane tank: my father built a a propane kiln for his pottery, and used to run it from a 100lb (iirc) tank. It would freeze up in about 30 minutes if he just ran it. What he did was get a big tub, one normally used to hold ice and a beer keg, and filled it with water. That was enough to prevent his tank from freezing up. I imagine that if the water were to start to ice up, you could dump some of the water and refill.

[@SkylerLinux]

Tesla Turbine would work very well with this micro steam powerplant

[@DreadX10]

Could you explain the "very well" part? I understand that most application for that turbine "barely" work and when you want torque you choose something else than a Tesla-turbine.

[@termiterasin]

@@DreadX10 low torque doesn't matter because they are meant for high speed. high speed means it will play nicer with dc motors being used as generators.

[@htomerif]

Usually on a 3 phase brushless motor the number of poles is, well, divisible by 3. So probably 18. I counted them. 24. The observant among you might count 22 magnets. For this kind of what I'm guessing is a gimbal motor, having 1 less (or 2 less) magnets evens out the cogging at the cost of overall motor strength.

[@381delirius]

i think your turbine design is better at capturing velocity of the fluid rather than the pressure.

[@seanmyers227]

Wooow! In the first 2 minutes there's a few complex mechanical principles I barely understand and I love it

[@blubb7711]

This guy is an absolute maniac. He uses Catia in his spare time.

[@arthurmoore9488]

You say maniac, I say made of money.

[@Ammoniummetavanadate]

You can make the vanes out of bearing bronze and then add some steam formulated lubrication oil to keep everything moving.

[@AllanDeal]

Next episode a steam powered electrical generator for a monorail fridge carriage

[@AllanDeal]

@xacttoeblade 😂

[@martinleska4292]

You can use some type of conventional air powered pneumatic tool - grinder or drill. They has vane type motor. Vanes are made from some type of hard resin and probably it is possible to replace them with brass and lubricate steam by dripping oil in steam.

[@SkippiiKai]

One correction: Mosfets are in their linear region when they are saturated. The earlier region is called the ohmic region. With BJTs, the first region is called linear, then they go into saturation. Mosfets decrease their resistance roughly linearly during their ohmic region when you use then as a power sink, then don't change much in their saturated region where it's pretty flat, called the linear region. Yes, I know it's stupid and confusing. No, I have no idea what the regions are called for IGBTs because I gave up learning the correct terminology after I learned this stupid fact about Mosfets. Now I just make up my own words like "Flat line" and "Y=mx+b region"

[@Xsiondu]

I support the IGBT community

[@EtherTheReal]

Your projects inspire me to give everyday my all to become an engineer like you. All of your calculations, preparations and thoughts that go into your projects are so cool and make me excited to try something (harmless) on my own - thank you Hyperspace!

[@iNcog_AoE]

babe wake up

[@smug_cat1]

I'm up

[@robertschnobert9090]

Anyone watching this video in 2027? 🌈 ​@@smug_cat1

[@FatDaddio-bo8km]

Lol

[@roryhennessey1983]

​@robertschnobert9090 that's the year I was born

[@RyanMacala]

You are brilliant. The simplification of complexity is legendary. Keep up the good work!

[@dvrs-e6t]

As you already have access to a 3D printer, it might be worth looking into Axial Flow turbines. Might improve efficiency

[@henrikstenlund5385]

It is refreshing to see this kind of quick-and dirty operation. You might use the extra heat for heating your house in the Winter

[@GarthClarkson]

I'm impressed with your little paddle steamer (forgive the pun) turbine. I love that you were able to machine something like this with a small hobby CNC machine. Although I have several 3D printers I haven't taken the plunge on the CNC yet. You have inspired me to move that project closer to the top of the list. Thanks. On another note. The paddle steamer style turbine is inherently inefficient due to the expansion of steam only occurs while the segment is over the steam nozzle and the rest of the rotation to the exhaust us just moving it around and then when leaving the exhaust port the remaining expansion is lost to the atmosphere. The conical expansion of the steam is the reason why we use bladed turbines with a conical expansion profile, ensuring that nearly all the energy of the expansion is converted to rotation before the exhaust leaves the turbine at nearly atmospheric pressure. I couldn't be bothered looking it up but from memory of my school days, a very long time ago, I believe the expansion ratio of water to steam is around 170:1 unless superheated so that needs much more expansion to capture that energy than your little turbine did, so that explains much of the 0.65% efficiency. Not being nitpicky. I am sure that you are aware of all of this and the reason for not doing a "proper" turbine is that they are so damn fiddly and complex and would be near impossible to build using the gear you have available in your workshop. Thanks again. Love your work. Cheers.

[@tommaragos2764]

Awesome video, and like everyone else in the comments wanted to throw in some potential easy upgrade ideas. Depends if you want to recapture the steam after use, but drilling large holes on the turbine closeout plate will allow a little less parasitic loss from the existing exit hole. You just want to get the majority of velocity as it exits the nozzle, then get it out of the turbine as fast as possible, without restriction. Currently there is less pressure drop at the nozzle , as you noted by the expanding steam as it leaves the exhaust.

[@D-B-Cooper]

Brass mister nozzles are useful and if you go with vanes you can go with through vanes to take away centrifugal friction.

[@lreid2495]

Your alligator clips? Look like they've been appropriately loved. Cheers for the fantastic vids.

[@JaenEngineering]

Another thing you could try is feeding the high pressure exhaust into another, slightly bigger turbine.

[@rvanmiller]

You should flip the turbine housing 180 degrees. That way any condensate will drain out and you won't loose power from pump water out with the turbine.

[@crackedemerald4930]

you should insulate all the hot stuff, with steam engines, heat is your friend, and the less you're putting in the air, the less you need to be burning.

[@beautifulsmall]

The joy of experimentation shared is a real pleasure . there is a feel that comes from making things by hand, an understanding of the physics and thermodynamics wonderfully tested in the real world. I wish we could do that in our labs at work.

[@tacticalviking86]

Very cool setup. Coming from the power generation field if you add a flywheel to the setup it will help with smoothing out your power output. Also tighter clearances and a stiffer shaft so you don't get any wobble.

[@AMTunLimited]

A random suggestion for the power curve testing device: maybe use a digital potentiometer? It's an IC that acts like a potentiometer that could be controlled from the same arduino you're using to measure. You could automate the testing process to a one button process where the arduino steps through a range of resistances. Although now that I thing about it, you could also use an analog out on the arduino to drive the mosfet directly?

[@woowooNeedsFaith]

You do a good job at minimising the efficiency at almost all fronts.

[@TobiasKornmayer]

Maybe try a multistage pressurized grinder setup next? Maybe one into two, mechanically belt linked for overexpansion?

[@pauloneill9880]

Excellent video tailored for the worry filled current climate of life in the west at the moment. When fema has become worse than a joke but a life taking extortionist, then a form of heat, power and clean water all in one is Genious. Your dry, self deprecating humour is also delicious to this concerned British viewer.

[@ProlificInvention]

You are an absolute genius, thank you for this entertaining and extremely informative video. I have been working on a similar project using an all metal Tesla turbine bought from eBay for around $100 so your boilerless steam generator design is perfect. In the future I'd enjoy seeing your rendition of a hydrosonic pump for heating water into steam, your rotor you machined reminded me of it when I saw your balance holes drilled all over.

[@johntrevick2060]

For steam boilers there is a water injector that runs off steam and can push water into the boiler at a higher pressure than the steam powering it. I forget the name but it uses a venturi inside IIRC. Genius device from 100 years ago.

[@KR4FTW3RK]

Injectors are almost magic

[@tomattore]

This is the next level of a scientific entertainment content. My respect to you, sir!

[@douglasmcleod7481]

i loved the whole video and felt like i was in a college class at the same time. last year i built a bigger set up with a 9 inch squirrel cage blower . i was able to spin a 12 volt 105 amp alternator at 1200 rpm . i did achieve super heated steam from my set up but it constantly melted my solder fittings lol . cheers

[@TheElectronicDilettante]

Great video! I was thinking, what if you used a Harbor Freight die grinder to drive your BLDC motor (or alternator)? Instead of using propane and a pipe to heat the copper tubing, you could bend the tubing into a cylindrical bifilar coil and place it inside one of those charcoal briquette lighting cans, then fill it with charcoal for heat. You could stoke the coals as necessary to maintain the heat. This method, if workable, could be an emergency solution using scrap materials. Thanks for putting in the time and effort on these videos-they’re well worth watching!

[@daviddavidson2357]

As you said you could use the propane exhaust to generate extra pressure from the tank. For a version 2 you could put the tank in a water tank as a heat buffer (basically a double boiler) use a valve that either directs exhaust to the tank, or down a tube facing away from the tank. Have the valve hooked up to a servo and use a thermistor or thermocouple hooked up to a PID (or just P or PI) controller to control how much exhaust is directed at the water tank with a ideal temp of about 50°C, thermistor in the water, if the water goes above 60°C an additional emergency mode on the uC kicks in and closes the valve, redirecting all exhaust away from the tank and an ice dispenser above the tank to quickly cool the water. Using a water tank also helps to mitigate any kaboom should the system fail. At least from the pressure in said tank. When filling SCUBA tanks they were always dumped into a water tank for a few reasons. 1)Leaks from the hose or A-Clamp/DIN connector are easy to spot. 2)Water absorbs energy so if a tank ruptured, it would be less of an issue 3) It stops the tanks heating up as they're pressurised

[@chemicalvamp]

I love steam projects. I have one kicking around in my brain I have not yet started. You know those car jacks you can run off of compressed air, Air over hydraulic or Pneumatic Hydraulic pumps. I wanted to create pneumatic energy storage for little pistons to automate ideal positioning, use steam to compress ambient air. A complete time waster I know, The idea of this project is to make a rainbow, using a prism, but still requiring the sun and rain.

[@ted_van_loon]

there are many simple yet very effective and obvious optimizations. 1: using the steam to pressurize the water, either do this like how you use the gas, or make it push a piston so it can be used in hard shaking environments(or to use a different diameter to change the pressure to get higher pressure than the steam on the water. this also prevents the raid cooling of the tank, and it stabilizes the pressure of the steam output making the turbine somewhat more efficient. 2: use the heat from the output to preheat the water before the fire stage, let the water go through some heat exchanger or curled copper pipe in the steam before going to the flame section, try to build it in a cage in that stage so most heat is retained. if you still got some notable heat on the output make it hit the water tank to also slightly preheat that already, make sure it doesn't have to much resistance but does heat the water a lot. the most important is to heat the water which needs to go to the flame stage, this way you can use a way smaller flame once it is started. 3: use a different type of turbine, you might not like to hear it due to probably being praised so much, but use a tesla turbine, they are super easy to make, and tolerances don't come as close yet are more easy to match than with the kind of turbine you use now, tesla turbines when powered with steam easily reach over 97% efficiency, even when made badly they can easily get close to that, they also reach a high rpm easily allowing the generator to generate more power and a higher voltage so less loss in the diodes. but seriously try it, much more easy to make, also works better with such big spacings and such I know people said the disks would extend due to the force of the speed and jam the motor, but that 100 years ago back then metal was insanely crappy, these modern days much thinner and less stable plates or even jet fans can reach much higher speeds your hand milled thing didn't exten either. and even then the disks extending was in rather compact motors which where said to output over 10000hp modern day motors don't even come close to that and you won't need to come anywhere close to that for your mini generator. 4. edit the heating pipe, you push through way more heat than it can handle, you where so bussy making sure it could move through as much energy in flames as possible that you forgot that it was to heat that pipe with water, there is a huge air volume in the middle which isn't used, either add in something lik pylons or pyramids at some points to move it outward to the pipes, or let the pipes also go through the center or just make it thinner. or make the outlet smaller and reduce the gasflow. you can also make it like a oven using a chimney to pull out the old air and push in new air into the flame directly, or if you want to be more efficient use a small amount of power from the turbine to power some small fan pulling in air also make sure the air is aimed at the flame. ofcource you can also use wood or such instead of gas, making a well isolated oven however would be easy to save a lot of energy since your flame from the blowtorch generates insane amounts of energy. if you want to use it for huge amounts of generation however then you would need a motor which won't burn when generating that much but a tesla turbine might work still just make sure the water absorbs more heat from the pipe and increase the pressure on the watertank to increase feeding, this last part is most easily done by just raising the water tank up higher if you used the steam to pressurize it.

[@sneakythumbs9900]

Technically you are describing the difference between a fire-tube boiler (like the train) and a water-tube boiler. A flash boiler can be shaped like either of those but the water does not boil inside the furnace/boiler but in an external vessel downstream.

[@roboman2444]

You can probably abuse an automotive A/C or power steering pump. AFAIK most p/s pumps are sliding vane based, and, in track driving, can get hot enough to boil the power steering fluid (oil), so they likely can survive steam as long as there was a little bit of oil mixed in with it. I'm pretty sure i saw a video of some guy using one combined with a "turbocharger burn barrel" to run a automotive alternator. Also consider using an automotive style alternator instead of a BLDC motor. There are tiny ones you can find. You can easily control them with an Arduino by adjusting the field winding voltage (pwm). That way you can find the optimal RPM, and just use the Arduino to keep it there, even with varying loads, as well as have it cut the field winding power to avoid "stalling" if the load was too high.

[@hoofheartedicemelted296]

Exceptional work re-balancing the rotor sir.

[@D.MauroBaiardiTwerd]

Watching at 0.65x speed, between the technical jargon,the english being my second language and the fact that you dont need to breathe and can spit words fast and stopless like a minigun… my brain cooks at 1x speed. Great video btw.

[@pauldorman]

You could take some of the heat from the turbine outlet to warm your propane bottle. A diverter valve would allow you to maintain a balance between keeping the propane from getting too cold and blowing your face off 😁 Keep going with this idea. I reckon the potential market for a mini rocket stove power plant that can charge your phone or laptop will be huge!! 🤣

[@Soggstermainia]

If you found a way to make a gravity feed pressure work, insulated some things and improved the efficiency you could make it into a "stick" format for campers to use bu placing across a fire. The higher heat would allow a one way valve like in a drip kettle which might provide the flow needed to make it work from gravity feed. And if you added a second stage to the steam generator you could recover more energy too. Choosing insulators for the housing and impellers instead of metals it might be lighter and suck less heat from the steam and at that point could make it larger or add a third stage for even more efficiency. Lots of ways to improve. As someone else's said the hottest part might be better used as a superheater portion before the steam leaves the boiler/heater.

[@zackl3094]

Dude yes. I've been wanting to prototype some micro steam for years. I'm thinking water heater + old turbocharger to start...

[@italoximenes8755]

2:03 the safety gasp I gasped. SIR! I need you alive to make more cryocooling videos.

[@turboimport95]

nice bro, I got hella suggestion to make this way better!! Use a turbocharger as the turbine, It can soak up as much heat and spin as high as you want to go, On top of that route the wasted steam exhaust around the metal pipe to preheat the pipe, using less fuel to heat it up. you can connect a shaft to the turbo exhaust turbine wheel to spin the generator. Max Efficiency!!

[@vylbird8014]

A good option for a much larger engine, but you'd need a boiler to match - it's scaling up considerably.

[@turboimport95]

@@vylbird8014 they make really small turbos people put on go karts etc. as well.

[@luigisaporito9350]

The rotor of the turbine you show at the end of the video remind me the kind of vacuum pump mounted on the machine using in the supermarket for put the food under vacuum condition for preserving. The little plastic parts moving in the rotor are made, often, in ptfe as you wrote in the video. them moving in and out by the form of the stator. for perfect seal is used a very high viscosity oil, from minimum sw 40 till sw 100.

[@pisoiorfan]

If you look at DeLaval impulse turbines, after jet passes past a curved blade it escapes to a minimal pressure zone. What you do by confining the "gap" between rotor and case it's exactly the opposite. You may try big holes in the two cover plates. And leave more room around the rotor. Also for max efficiency the rotor's blade speed needs to be around 1/2 steam jet's nozzle speed, but a 3600rpm, 5cm turbine is way lower than that.

[@keatoncampbell820]

Steam gens want to get hot before they run, massively improves efficiency. You don't want water condensing until it leaves the entire system, so most steam plants have a bypass valve to allow hot steam to push through and heat the turbines and lines, while drains are open to let the water out. Once dry steam is coming out, the drains are closed and the system spun up.

[@hoofheartedicemelted296]

You can take difficult concepts and simplify them. Kudos sir.

[@deimersuarez2493]

Your video are a treat, I feel like I'm back to my Mech. Eng. classes each time. Awesome!

[@TheWorldBelow360]

Omg you have just shown me what the hell I’ve been missing for this other thing also that I am soon to go be doing… I swear! Thank Heaven for the Light of Doy!

[@Egon_Freeman]

Now _this_ video is one I'm absolutely saving. :D You know those memes about how, if you were sent back in time, you wouldn't actually have any clue as to how any of the advanced stuff we enjoy _actually works?_ Or how to recreate it using tools of the era? Well, precision machining might not work, but regular _hands_ might do if you _scale it up..._ This is exactly the sort of thing you'd need to present _the principle_ with, to then have some genius (or a room full of _regular_ engineers) take over and work out the actual practical implementation.

[@alexrogers9086]

You did pretty good for your first time machining

[@bwobbles2368]

Always excited when I get a new video notification from you! Excellent videos, both educational and funny, I have actually put many pieces of info gained from these videos to use.

[@ghosttheoremproductions5469]

For a converging/diverging nozzle you could probably braze two carb jets together. Large jets plus a little drilling and easy to jig.