How does a coal burning diesal engine work?

[ronrunner]

Somebody mentioned a Coal burning deisal Eldorado Cadillac..also Rudolph Deisal .made designs for a coal dust powered deisal piston engine..how would that be fired

[SD70Dude]

The coal-fired Cadillac had a turbine, not a compression-ignition piston engine.  

Here's an old thread on a prototype GE locomotive with a FDL engine that was converted to run on pulverized coal slurry.

http://cs.trains.com/trn/f/741/t/136871.aspx

[Overmod]

SD70Dude

Here's an old thread on a prototype GE locomotive with a FDL engine that was converted to run on pulverized coal slurry.

Strange you mention this; it was a follow-on to the fuel used in the Eldorados (and part of the Otisca SRC process was critical to the economics).

This is a coal-water slurry, so an appreciable part of the piston thrust is actually steam and the NOx is reduced.  Supposedly the injector-wear issue was solved by using grown diamonds, and they got the liner wear down from 6x to 2x that of a standard FDL... but they are oddly silent on the engine lubrication consequences of excess water vapor in the charge.  The interesting thing to me is that they made comparable horsepower at full 1050rpm in a 12-cylinder motor...

... unfortunately with extremely high CO2 emission, something acceptable in the early '80s but far less so now. It was certainly a better potential answer than any of the external-combustion proposals at the time!

[BEAUSABRE]

Bring back EMD's FG9 !

EMD FG9 Locomotive (utahrails.net)

 

[Overmod]

BEAUSABRE

Bring back EMD's FG9!

For those of you with actual interest in this technology and access to SAE papers, here is a brief listing of papers on the Hyprex 'technology'  Ford's version:

https://www.sae.org/publications/technical-papers/content/570032/

 Here's a little entertainment-

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Anbm8a-HT9s

[charlie hebdo]

There is no market for such a thing now in an era where AGCC is a crisis. 

AFAIK,  the Wehrmacht had some  pulverized coal trucks due to severe petrol shortages. 

[Overmod]

charlie hebdo

There is no market for such a thing now in an era where AGCC is a crisis.

Agreed with respect to any SRC solution, with some technological regret -- it was a good solution when zero-net-CO2 wasn't a priority.

There did remain some use for solvent extraction of 'renewable' carbon, e.g. from torrefied biomass, but with current concentration on full zero-carbon rather than zero-net-carbon that, too, can be deprecated as a subject for active research.

On the other hand, the free-piston gasifier remains an interesting technology, particularly with the advent of practical variable-geometry power turbines.  

[Overmod]

charlie hebdo

AFAIK,  the Wehrmacht had some  pulverized coal trucks due to severe petrol shortages.

This might have been several things, of which perhaps the likeliest imho was a variant of producer-gas generator.  These were apparently common in the '30s and '40s; I think I first heard about them when reading Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, where I remember 'charcoal-burning cars' were mentioned.  I thought they were cheap emergency expedients, but there was considerable development of the approach in Europe and -- with the right design of engine -- fairly flexible operation of large vehicles is practicable.

The key is that a side-valve (F or L-head) flathead long-stroke/undersquare engine is suited to run on very lean fuel with slow combustion -- those were common in the days of primitive gasoline composition, but not now (for a variety of largely good reasons!) and while periodically someone will dust off gas-producer systems -- I remember seeing a couple touted in the 'energy independence' days of mid-Seventies misery -- none of them was particularly desirable.

[SD60MAC9500]

 

I'd like to see a syn-diesel made from coal gas and it's associated CO2 byproduct in a blue form. Sort of a CGTD similiar to how GTL from NG feedstocks using the Fischer-Tropsch process.

 

 

[Overmod]

These are fun BUT involve a proportion of fossil carbon.  Personally I'd rather see subsidized industrial effort go into zero-net-carbon and then full zero-carbon alternatives.  With some care, blue hydrogen (which with sequestration is a zero-carbon approach) can be reasonably cost-effectively built out with zero-net-carbon energy.  Some of that might be construable as virtue signaling, but it also shows a good engineer's sense of detail design integrity.