Erik_MagMy original post was missing two very important words... 4,500hp GTEL consumption at full throttle was on the order of 450gph.
I take it you mean that the idle sfc of the turbine is comparable to sfc of one of the various 4400hp prime movers in Run 8 reasonably fully loaded?
I have to wonder whether in the age of AC synthesized drive from smoothed DC-Link, the general idea of the GTEL (running on the same gas-oil fuel used for practical high-speed diesels) might be resurrected using a variant of genset operation. Here the turbine would be paralleled with one (or more, if warranted) reasonably-sized piston-engine gensets (which themselves could be effectively shut down and restarted using their load-management software) which would provide the loading to run a given train at low speed or start it moving up to "Run 8 compatible" speed until the turbine could be spun up and preheated for emissions and brought on line. The pony engine in the GTELS was only about 800hp in my recollection, and only acted on a couple of the TMs for hostling. My version would have reasonable turndown and, presumably, corresponding idle and low-power fuel efficiency, but still allow a reasonable QSK or C175 engine to co-exist with the ceramic turbine in a reasonable carbody and frame length...
Another Steveo fan!
Who would have thought that on a railroad forum.
Overmod Erik_Mag My original post was missing two very important words... 4,500hp GTEL consumption at full throttle was on the order of 450gph. I take it you mean that the idle sfc of the turbine is comparable to sfc of one of the various 4400hp prime movers in Run 8 reasonably fully loaded?
Erik_Mag
My original post was missing two very important words... 4,500hp GTEL consumption at full throttle was on the order of 450gph.
More like just plain "fc" (fuel consumption) as opposed to specific fuel consumption. I'm very sure a modern 4,500hp combustion turbine would have a much lower sfc than the ~1949 vintage GT used in the Little Blows.
What I'd think would be an ideal Turbine locomotive is to use a turbine with reasonably good efficiency with a 50% turndown along with a battery capable of handling about 2 hours of the turbine's rated output. If the locomotive is going to spend an extended time running below 50% power, the turbine can be shut down. This would also allow for recovery of braking energy.
On a slightly different subject, did you see the reports of a "ducted injector" for diesel engines from Sandia? They're claiming that the ducted injector will lower particulates AND NOx. The inspiration was from the Bunsen burner, guessing that the duct promotes evaporating the fuel before significant combustion takes place so that the combustion process is more like a gasoline (spark ignited mixture) engine.
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