Electroliner 1935 Didn't some locomotives use thick oil that required heating to flow?
Didn't some locomotives use thick oil that required heating to flow?
SD70DudeHeavy fuel oil can solidify in cold weather.
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
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tree68Woe to the Diesel truck driver that doesn't have "winter grade" fuel oil in his tanks when the temperatures dip here in the north country.
I have sometimes wondered why OTR trucks weren't made with tracer heating for the fuel and injector lines to allow year-round use of #2, as the heat content and some other characteristics of 'winter' #1 are inferior.
(I found out that just heating the HFCM ain't enough to stop the stoppage... )
I have a couple of CB&Q wheel reports from June and July 1966 that show lots of UTLX tank cars loaded with asphalt headed to Asphalt Products Co. in Stevens Point, Wi and WAUCOUHIGH in Ogdensburg, WI (assume this to be Waupaca County Highway department). So asphalt has been being shipped by rail for a long time. The cars b eing used were mostly older UTLX X-4 tank cars with steam heating lines.
Coincidence....I'm planning to modify a tank car kit to resemble The Barrett Co.'s car of early 20th century that carried the company's coal tar-based goo ("Tarvia") that was used for road surfacing. Couldn't figure how to paste a photo here, but anyone can Google the company and find photos of the cars it used.
Overmod tree68 Woe to the Diesel truck driver that doesn't have "winter grade" fuel oil in his tanks when the temperatures dip here in the north country. Well, he can always use anti-gelling additives in his #2 if "caught by surprise" -- the catch being that he has to put it in quickly enough, or early enough, that the treated fuel gets all the way through to the injectors in time. I have sometimes wondered why OTR trucks weren't made with tracer heating for the fuel and injector lines to allow year-round use of #2, as the heat content and some other characteristics of 'winter' #1 are inferior. (I found out that just heating the HFCM ain't enough to stop the stoppage... )
tree68 Woe to the Diesel truck driver that doesn't have "winter grade" fuel oil in his tanks when the temperatures dip here in the north country.
Well, he can always use anti-gelling additives in his #2 if "caught by surprise" -- the catch being that he has to put it in quickly enough, or early enough, that the treated fuel gets all the way through to the injectors in time.
Here's why you do not heat the fuel up Overmod. The hotter the fuel is in the tanks the less power you get from your charge of fuel. My boss did a study and for every 10 degrees of fuel temp we lost .5% of that trucks MPG. So say a truck could get 9 MPG on a tank of fuel that was at 60 degrees at 90 degrees it was getting 8.86 MPG on that same tank of fuel. The same thing goes for the air charge on a diesel engine. So now you know why we strive to keep the air coming into the engine as cool as possible along with the fuel going into those injectors coming out of the tank.
The biggest difference between #1 and #2 diesel is this #1 has most of the waxes removed from it so it will flow at a lower temp. When diesel fuel gels up all that is happening is that the wax that is suspended in it normally thickens up and comes out of suspension that it normally stays in. Winter blend #2 is normally a blend of 50/50 1 and 2 diesel fuels and is good for most areas. You really do not need number 1 fuel until your running in sub zero temps for a long time.
DR DENNIS GORDANGlass is not a liquid, nor do windowpanes sag in less than billions of years, at least according to Scientific American and other reputedly reliable sources. Those thicker bottoms on window panes were the way they were made.
On the other hand I've seen too many older flat windowpanes that have visibly (albeit very slightly) slumped to believe they were all just made that way. My suspicion is that this might be related to their being thin glass oriented vertically in areas subject to solar radiation, with a large number of small changes in bonding all accumulating over long time, analogous in a way to how signal can be recovered from noise in NMR. It is certainly not because they very slowly flowed like pitch over the years.
Incidentally, I was not suggesting that the tracer lines actually heat the fuel; only that they maintain the liquid inside above waxing/gelling temperature. Under some circumstances you might want to apply 'higher heat' for a short time -- for example if surprised by a cold snap while the heat monitoring was turned off -- but you would cut back to 'least effective heat' ASAP, probably thermostatically.
The catch is that you can't monitor just temperature at the injection pump to determine where waxing might be a concern.
Fuel in the tanks is another matter that I didn't address. I have never liked the idea of putting coils of any kind inside the tank, any more than I like putting them in the engine-oil sump or in the cooling-water jackets through freeze plugs or the like. In principle the same approach as the external-patch engine "block heater" I had on the PowerCerebrovascularAccident ought to be adaptable to lagged fuel tanks...
Overmod In the interests of correctness -- yes, this is right; glass is an amorphous solid but below its glass transition temperature the bonds are 'self-correcting' against gravity. Post has been corrected, and yes, I did know better. On the other hand I've seen too many older flat windowpanes that have visibly (albeit very slightly) slumped to believe they were all just made that way. My suspicion is that this might be related to their being thin glass oriented vertically in areas subject to solar radiation, with a large number of small changes in bonding all accumulating over long time, analogous in a way to how signal can be recovered from noise in NMR. It is certainly not because they very slowly flowed like pitch over the years.
In the interests of correctness -- yes, this is right; glass is an amorphous solid but below its glass transition temperature the bonds are 'self-correcting' against gravity. Post has been corrected, and yes, I did know better.
Since typical window glass is opaque to some UV, it wouldn't be an incredible stretch to have some of the bonds being messed with and causing deformation. OTOH, the lack of a regular crystal structure in glass prevents the formation of dislocations that permit plastic deformation in metals.
The improvement in signal to noise ratio from averaging in NMR (and NQR, radar and some other areas) comes from the signal adding coherently (proportional to the number of averages) while the noise does a random walk and increases with the square root of the noise. The flip side is that the noise can improve resolution as you see signals with amplitudes smaller than the least significant bit of the digitizer.
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