600 HP Snow Compressor Engine - Saturday afternoon run
Vložit
- čas přidán 22. 03. 2014
- 600 HP Snow Compressor Engine - Saturday afternoon run.
These engines were used in gas pipeline pumping stations. This one came out of Roystone Station, between Kane and Warren.
At the time of this video, the engine was being run well below design speed, at approximately 64 rpm, as the cooling water plumbing was incomplete at the time. The museum has the gas supply to run it at full speed, approx 100 rpm, on all 4 ends.
It is also proposed to connect the compressor, and get the engine under load. Air would be used as a load, rather than gas. There is some concern that it would be slightly loud...
Coolspring Power Museum
October 2013
131019 Snow Late Sat - Věda a technologie
42 years a stationary engineer, now retired 10 years.. I appreciate your posting this. Hope to get down to see it in person next summer.
You would really enjoy it. The important thing compared to other shows is that they run it at approximately full design speed. There is some uncertainty about design speed, as most info is for the 400 hp engines, with smaller flywheels, which would have a higher safe speed than this 600 Hp engine. Of course going to the later 2 row 90 degree engines allowed a much smaller flywheel, and higher speed. This is only one of a large number of wonderful big engines at the museum, that get run at design speed. Sensory overload! Note, Coolspring Power Museum has an excellent website, with a per-building catalog of all of the permanent engines, with design details and history of each. Worth a look.
Love the music it makes...
Stand at flywheel is equiped with cut out for ignition in case of over speed , spring loaded trip built into flywheel hits switch killing ignition .
It's relaxing because it's 4 beats to the bar.1234.1234.1234.
awesome high quality video! thanks!!
The Amish at 3:57 "Mein Gott! Brother Jedidiah, look at this fantastic modern engine!"
My kind of heavy metal music.🤘
What a sound!
watched the clip, and I' d have to agree with one comment about the operational characteristics of this machine, just watching that flywheel assy, and imagine this whole oper ation going at full speed
Since then, it's been run at full speed most of the time. In fact, it hits the overspeed trip occasionally.
Here I was wondering why they needed to compress snow.
derp :)
It was built in Buffalo, they get a lot of snow every winter!
The piston must have an increfible high amount of force. This will crush everything you throw in.
To the photographer: nearly 20 minutes of close-ups. Great shots of the engine running, crank, camshaft, etc., and not 2 seconds of what the pump rod was connected to -- you know, the one alongside the crank. Yes, I know, Nothing (from other posts of this engine). But still...show EVERYTHING please!
I have many videos of this engine which show all of it. An early one was shot from above the crank before the crank cover was put on. Got oil splashed on my camera. The pump rod is disconnected from the engine. It's at the opposite end of the crank from the engine. If it was connected, and the pump working, the engine would be very loud and disturb the neighbors, and would suck massive amounts of fuel.
aaaaah the industrial revolution,curse the. gods of efficiency need more devices like these to remind the rest of the world how modern scociety actuall survives
Was würde mit dieser Maschine angetrieben?👍👍👍👍👍😃😃😃😃 Viele Grüße aus Germany
At the far end of the long piston rod beyond the crank is a natural gas compressor to either pump the gas along a pipeline, or to fill a storage reservoir.
So I'm going to stab a guess that there's 4 sealed combustion chambers inline with 4 pistons all sharing the same push rod that connects to the conrod explaining the valve action following from the front to the back instead of just having 4 separate cylinders for a very specific reason. Am I close? I've got no idea here.
Almost. It's 2 double ended cylinders, each with 1 piston. It's a normal 4 stroke, with firing progressing from the control stand end toward the crank + flywheel. 2 revolutions to complete, 720 degrees. Cylinder 1 A end fires at 0, cylinder 1 B end at 180, Cylinder 2 A end at 360, Cylinder 2 B end at 540 degrees.
+SteamCrane oh very interesting I've been looking all over the internet now and I see how they've got this engine to work. A two stroke open crank engine would rely on the cross head configuration to allow the cylinder to seal and somebody has taken that idea, the idea of a double acting steam engine and decided well these can't be two stroke if it's going to be double acting but a 4 stroke will work like this. I'm going to assume a two stroke would work if you had two cylinders like this set up to fire every 180 degrees if say the first cylinder's TDC was at the front and the rear cylinder's TDC was at the rear to fire when the crank pin was at BDC to send the conrod back up again. That'd make an interesting small model engine indeed.
+SteamCrane I see also that the front two ends would process first two hits and the rear two ends would process the next two while the first two are exhausting and drawing in fresh fuel again like you said allowing for that combustion hit at every 180 degrees. It's pretty cool to stop and think about this stuff.
Are there more than one piston on the conrod in these engines? I've always wondered why the valves are placed along the cylinder on these engines and not at the head.
There is a single piston in each of the 2 double acting cylinders.
To add confusion, the Snow company called each end of each cylinder as a separate numbered cylinder. Thus the cylinder near the control stand is called cylinders 1 + 2, and the cylinder near the crank is cylinders 3 + 4.
I believe the intake and exhaust ports are very close to the cylinder heads. There is an enormous elevation plan on the wall that shows cylinder cross sections etc.
what is this engine powered by? Gasolin? Diesel? or something else maybe?
Natural gas. It's job is to compress natural gas, so it will never run out of fuel.
Is that BIll MaGoo running that thing?
FatBikeRacer that's mr magoo to you
Low voltage direct ignition... There is no ignition coils, only mechanical driven breakers inside the cylinder. It can make a giant powerful spark(usually an electric arc), that can easily ignite any lean or rich air-gas mixtures. This engine cant suffer from flooded spark plugs :)
This engine has dual ignition, 2 igniters per cylinder end, total of 8. There are 2 coils per "end" in the wooden box on the wall. However, the coils are low tension, just a single coil of wire giving an inductive kick, rather than a primary and secondary coil. With just a little 6 volt battery, one of these coils puts out a scary loud bright white spark.
@@SteamCrane Just look at 13:41 it is 100% LVDI. You can see two low voltage wires and a mechanical ignitors drive. There is no coils at all. Only a battery(48 or 60V) and steel resistor to stabilize ignitor current and prevent short circuit of the battery. The lever in front pushes electrical contacts inside the cylinder and creates the spark. This system is much simpler, no need to make HV coils, wires with thick insulation and ceramic HV spark plugs. It creates very powerful spark. To transform a small induction kick into big pulse you need an electronic amplifier, that is used in modern engines.
@@Wetboyslim Not exactly. The system is electrically identical to a typical ignitor circuit on a smaller hit+miss non-sparkplug engine. The ignitors are just contacts, they aren't piezoelectric, and don't generate a spark by themselves. They need something to generate a moderate voltage to create the spark. We are familiar with the system, as we have several ignitor engines, a couple with magnetos, and others which use a battery and low tension coil. Search google for "low tension coil". Without the coil, the source for the spark would only be the 6 or 12 volt battery voltage, not nearly enough. This engine uses an old 12 volt car battery, but would probably do just fine on 6 volts, as we use with our engines.
While an ignitor engine doesn't have a high voltage coil with both primary + secondary windings, it does use either a magneto or a single circuit inductive coil to generate moderately high voltage, via make-and-break created by the ignitors being closed and suddenly reopened.
This engine has 2 ignitors per end, for a total of 8. The wooden box contains the 8 inductive coils, one per ignitor. The little levers are indicators to show field strength in each coil. A while ago, one of the ignitors was not firing well, as indicated by one of the little flippers barely moving. The flippers were an excellent diagnostic tool in the pre-OBD era, as you could see visually how strongly each was pulled in by the coil magnetism.
@@SteamCrane Nice method to use 12 volt battery with mechanical driven ignitor. In our museum we have a gas engine, that was built 1924, it uses five 12 volt batteries to power ignition system. It is also horizontal tandem, but have only one cylinder and 280 HP. Its ignitors have a bridge- type contacts and creates two sparks simultaneously.
@@Wetboyslim There is a coil for each of the 8 igniters inside the cylinders in the wooden box on the wall. These are each a single coil of wire, with no secondary. They don't make enough voltage to jump across a spark plug gap, but the high number of turns makes a very hot spark from the inductive kick when the igniters open to break the circuit. ie, the spark occurs when the igniter contacts *open*.
Run video at 1.5 speed to see normal RPM :-D
Since it's been debugged, they often run it at approximately full speed. I just posted a video of it running near design speed, and have other videos where the overspeed trip triggered. There's a small margin between full speed and overspeed trip, hard to maintain unloaded, so they usually stay slightly below nominal.
Very impressive bit of engineering and a great demonstration of dedication and restoration skills. It always amazes me that someone will spend so much time and energy into restoring these engines and then I notice that they have an old auto battery hooked up for power supply and the wires are clamped to the terminals with a couple of vice grips, how crude and amateurish is that, not to mention that you are increasing the possibility of an accident. I can imagine how embarrassing it would be at a public demonstration when the engine fails to start all because of a proper inexpensive battery connection. Show some true professionalism boys.
Richard Morgan Vice Grips fail? I do not understand this concept. Seriously, this is one of the very early runs of this engine after serving as lawn art for many years. I am sure the proper battery clamps are in place now.