Does anyone know why the Germans would put a set of fans on a WWII era steam locomotive tender?
I would guess it has something to do with cooling fans for condensation. Maybe a certain amount of water went back through the tender to be cooled, kind of like the cooling towers on a power plant?
I dunno, just a quess. They seem like really BIG fans.
Mike.
My You Tube
It is a Condenser the used steam would go through a group of large "radiators" in which the steam would become water again and be reused...
Steve
If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough!
Deutsche Riechsbahn only built a few hundred of them equipped that way for service on the Eastern Front. They wouldn't emit any steam exhaust plumes with those condensers, so it was trickier for those IL-2 Sturmoviks to find them.
That is what I thought, they where avoiding marauding fighter planes. But how do you get the smoke out of the stack with out steam? Maybe compressed air?
Perhaps they used a fan or blower of some sort... they obviously had powerful enough fans to run the condenser...
Thank You.
If interested in this technical subject, look up the 'improved' African fan arrangement, which reduced wear from 'char', ash, and heat on the fan blades.
If you are using boiler-water treatment or operating in known bad-water areas, condensing may make sense for economic rather than life-extending reasons. It may also help with reducing back pressure in the cylinders. Note the arguments made for the idea in the ACE3000 patent description.
At least one of the British steam-turbine-electrics used a 'wet' condenser, where dirty or even gray water can be sprayed over the coils, greatly improving efficiency well into liquid phase for the 'good' water in the Rankine cycle. This renains really the only sort of approach that works without compromise on large North American power within sane packaging requirements...