Steam Engine Valves

Elimination of Flow-induced Instability from Steam Turbine Control Valves

This paper describes two steam turbine governor valve failures in the same installation, the troubleshooting that determined the root cause, and the new valve designed to prevent similar failures. The original governor valve design had been used successfully for many years in large multistage, multivalve steam turbines, but apparently was not reliable at the high steam pressures employed today....

Britain Sabotaged the Steam Engine of Leibniz and Papin

The early history of the invention of the steam engine shows without doubt that the British Royal Society, including Isaac Newton personally, deliberately prevented the industrial and naval applications of steam power for nearly 1 00 years. In fact, the Royal Society was so intent on burying Denis Papin's 1690 invention of a paddle-wheel-driven steamship, worked out in collaboration with Gottfr...

Steam Turbine Steam System

From Watt’s Steam Engine to the Unified Quantum Theory of Mechanics and Thermodynamics

Thermodynamics is the science that deals with all the phenomena that involve the transfer of energy, i.e. heat and work. Its development started in 1824 with the efforts of Sadi Carnot to improve the closed-cycle steam engine discovered by James Watt in 1764. In 1850, R. Clausius laid the foundations of the laws of thermodynamics. Soon thereafter a conflict between the second law of Thermodynam...

From steam engine to solar cells: can thermodynamics guide the development of future generations of photovoltaics?

Thermodynamics has played a singular role in the development of virtually all energy technologies to-date. This review argues that it also has a role to play in the understanding and design of solar cell operation, particularly looking toward the future, high-efficiency solar cells. After a historical overview of the key developments in the ‘thermodynamics of light,’ the conversion of a monochr...