Maritime Steam;

How Steam Revolutionized the Worlds

Shipping
John Forester, M.S., P.E.

1 The Power Revolution

2 Steam Power Basics

Thousands of years ago man learned to use

the power of animals to carry his loads on land
and the power of the wind to carry his loads at
sea. Animal power didnt work for maritime purposes; even trained rowers were used only for
maneuvering in and out of harbors and for sea
battles. Man also used water power to grind his
grain and to power small factories and textile mills,
but watermills are fixed in place and waterpower is
unusable for transportation. Those were all the
sources and uses of power that man had.
After four thousand years of development,
sailing ships carried men and goods to all the
shores of the Earth in reasonable safety (the
oceans are always dangerous to some extent),
along recognized trading routes, and often within
the expected voyage durations. The sailing ship,
and in particular the sailing navy, exhibited the
highest technology and technological organization
of its time. Then, two hundred years ago, at the
start of the nineteenth century, there started a revolution that in one century swept the commercial
and naval sailing ships from the seas, so that,
today, sailing vessels are used only for recreation,
for training seamen in the ways of the sea, the
maritime environment that hasnt changed, and for
some small fishing and trading services.
This revolution was created by mans discovery of a new source of power, steam power. When
man worked out how to apply the power of steam,
he applied it to his existing uses. First, to factories
and textile mills, to make them independent of
waterpower locations. Second, to ground transportation in the form of railroads. Third, to ocean
transportation in the form of steamships. In many
ways, development of satisfactory steam power for
maritime use was the more difficult problem and
took the longest time. This is the story of how that
came about.

2.1 The Machinery

The basic steam plant consists of:
1: The boiler over its furnace. The boiler is a
closed container for the water that the heat
from the furnace turns into steam. As the
water turns into steam, it expands many
times. The steam is both hot and it pushes
outward, which we call exerting pressure.
2: The steam engine. The engine uses the heat
and pressure of the steam to produce
mechanical power. In the early days, all steam
engines used pistons working in cylinders to
convert the heat power of the steam into
mechanical power, either push-and-pull, as on
pump rods, or rotating, as on shafts for propellers.
3: The condenser. The condenser accepts the
used steam from the engine and cools it off,
thus turning it back into water. This does two
things. Condensing the water makes it much
smaller (the opposite of boiling water). This
enables the condenser to operate at substantially vacuum pressure. Condensing the water
also makes it available again for use in the
boiler, a very important point in marine service, where the surrounding ocean water has
much salt in it, which ruins boilers.
4: Auxiliary machinery. There must be several
pumps. The condenser pump sucks the water
(formerly steam) out of the vacuum in the condenser up to room pressure. The boiler feed
pump pumps the water from room pressure
up to boiler pressure. The oil pump pumps oil
into the steam to lubricate the engine. The circulating pump circulates ocean water through
the condenser tubes to cool the steam.

2.2 The Principle

2.2.1 Converting Heat into Mechanical Power
The steam engine is a heat engine. That is, it
accepts high-temperature heat, converts some of
that heat to mechanical work, and rejects low-temperature heat. Of course, heat does not exist by
itself; something has to be hot or cold. For the
steam engine, this working fluid is steam. The
steam enters the engine at high temperature and
high pressure, and leaves the engine at low temperature and low pressure, with the heat difference converted into mechanical power.
2.2.2 Kinetic Theory of Gases
For those of you who remember some elementary physics, heat is the motion of molecules;
the higher the temperature, the faster the molecules move. In liquids, the molecules move around
each other, but stick to each other. When a liquid
is boiled, its molecules, one-by-one, get going fast
enough to jump out of the liquid and become a
gas. This gas is larger than the liquid, so, if the liquid is in a closed container, the molecules of gas
press outward on the walls of the container, which
is what is meant by pressure. Temperature and
pressure always go together as long as there is
both liquid and gas in the container.
The hotter the liquid, the faster the molecules
go when they escape the liquid state. The faster
each molecule goes, the more force it exerts when
it bounces off the wall of the container. Also, the
hotter the liquid the more molecules escape from
it. The combination of the number of molecules
and the speed with which they bounce off the
walls of the container is the force exerted by the
gas on the containers walls, which we call pressure. However, we reach an equilibrium when as
many molecules are attracted back into the liquid
as escape. Then the pressure is constant at that
temperature. Therefore, as long as we have both
liquid and its gas in a container, the higher the
temperature the higher the pressure, according to
a definite rule for each liquid. For water, water
boils at 212 degrees F at room pressure, which is
15 pounds per square inch. Water also boils at
375 deg F when enclosed to a pressure of 180
pounds per square inch, as in the boilers of our
ferryboat Berkeley.
2.2.3 The Efficiency Law
No heat engine can be 100% efficient. The
maximum efficiency is equal to:
HeatOutMaxEfficiency = HeatIn
---------------------------------------------Eq. 0.1
HeatIn

This means two things. The efficiency can

never be as high as 100%. The higher the high
temperature and the lower the low temperature,
the greater the difference between high and low
temperatures, the more efficient the engine can
be. Of course, this is only the highest theoretical
efficiency, that no engine can exceed. No engine
can be designed to be perfect; every practical
engine falls below the highest theoretical efficiency for its temperature span.
2.2.4 The Course of Development
One very significant problem for marine
steam is the amount of power that can be produced from each pound of fuel. Not only does fuel
cost money, but each pound of fuel that must be
carried prevents a pound of cargo from being carried. An inefficient engine not only costs more to
operate, it reduces the earning power as well. It is
not practical to reduce the low-temperature end of
the cycle below the temperature of the ocean
water in which the vessel floats. Therefore, the
course of development of marine steam has been
the search for ways to employ steam of higher
pressure and higher temperature, so that fuel consumption is reduced to a level supportable by the
trading that is available. Naturally, the high-value
trades employed steamships early, because they
could afford to use engines that were inefficient.
The low-value trades acquired steam later,
because they could not afford it until it became
more efficient.

2.3 Steam Engine Development

2.3.1 General
The development of any technology depends
on learning the science of it, applying that science
through engineering that is based on the science,
and discovering ways to overcome all the other
limitations that cause problems.
Steam engines existed long before the science was understood. That meant that they were
crude, inefficient machines. Once the science
became understood, bit by bit, it became possible
to build engines that were reasonably designed.
Then engineers had to develop all the bits and
pieces of the technology. For instance, there had
to be a standard for power, and there had to be
instruments to measure the power of an engine.
This short essay concentrates on only those
things that enabled the design of engines that
would fit into ships and the methods of increasing
their efficiency.

2.3.2 Newcomens Engine

The first successful steam engine was built
by Newcomen in 1712. It operated between the
temperature of boiling water at almost room pressure, say 220F, and room temperature, say 60F. It
was used only to pump water out of coal mines,
because it burned so much coal that it was uneconomic anywhere else. It had a separate boiler and
cylinder, but the cylinder also was the condenser.
The cylinder was vertical with an open top, down
into which the piston worked. The piston pulled
down a chain, connected to one end of a rocking
beam. The other end of the beam held up the
pump rod with its buckets down in the well. The
pump rod and buckets were so heavy that the
engine rested with the pump end of the beam
down and the piston at the top of the cylinder.
To operate the engine, the operator opened
two cocks, the drain cock to drain the bottom of
the cylinder and the steam cock to let steam from
the boiler fill the cylinder with steam. When the
cylinder was hot enough to fill with steam at room
pressure, the operator closed both the steam and
the drain cocks and opened another cock to let
cold water from an overhead tank spray into the
cylinder. The cold water condensed the steam,
producing almost a vacuum (as good a vacuum
you could get with water, and maybe a bit of air, in
the system). The vacuum inside the cylinder
allowed the normal pressure of the atmosphere on
the top of the piston to push it down, thus lifting
the pump rod with its buckets.
The operator then closed off the water cock,
opened the steam cock to allow the cylinder to fill
with steam, so that the weight of the falling pump
rod would pull the piston up to the top of the cylinder, and then opened the drain cock to drain off
the water from the bottom of the cylinder, and start
the cycle again.
It was some years before one of the young
boys who worked the cocks figured out a system
of cords from the working beam to operate the
cocks automatically.
Because this engine was driven by the pressure of the atmosphere (the steam didnt drive the
piston, just provided the opportunity to form a vacuum by condensing it) it wasnt called a steam
engine at all, but Newcomens Atmospheric
Engine, colloquially called a fire engine.
The parts of the typical Newcomen engine
were so crudely machined that pistons didnt fit
cylinders. The rim of the piston was stuffed with
greased cloth, and the top of the piston was
flooded with water, so that air could not leak in.

Such was the state of the art.

2.3.3 Watts Separate Condenser Engine
When Newcomens engines had been at
work for fifty years, there was a working model of
one at the University of Edinburgh, where Professor Black had been working on the science of
heat. The model didnt work very well, as might be
expected. Making the model work better was
assigned to the university mechanic, James Watt,
who had studied under Black.
Watt figured out that one reason that the
Newcomen engine used so much steam, and
hence required so much fuel, was that the entire
cylinder and piston had to be heated up to the
temperature of the steam at the start of every
stroke, after being cooled by the cold water that
was necessary to condense the steam. Watt provided a separate cold chamber, called the condenser, to condense the steam, so that the
cylinder could always be kept hot. That required a
different valving system, and, of course, a pump to
suck the water out of the condenser. Since water
occupied so much less volume than steam
(approximately 1/1600 of the volume), the condensate pump could be small and required little of the
total power.
Watts engine used much less fuel than Newcomens, and Watt is regarded as the inventor of
the steam engine.
The vacuum provided by the separate condenser enabled the cylinder to be built with a
closed top (except for the tight gland through
which the piston rod operated). This allowed the
piston to provide power in both directions,
because one side always had steam pressure
while the opposite side always had vacuum from
the condenser.
Based on Watts invention of the separate
condenser, Boulton and Watt established the first
modern factory to build the new engines, the real
start of modern industry.
Watts early engines were closely derived
from the Newcomen pumping engine, with a rocking beam on a pedestal, the upright cylinder under
one end and the other end the power end. However, the power end of the rocking beam, instead
of lifting the pump rod, became connected by a
connecting rod to a crank (not Watts invention;
there was a patent squabble over that) to provide
rotating power that was more useful in a factory.
Watt made many other detail improvements, also.
The greater complexity of the machinery, and
its productivity, both required and enabled it to be

built with better technique. The birth of the steam

engine created the machine tool industry to make
the machines that could make better steam
engines.
The new design of engine enabled it to use
steam at higher than atmospheric pressure. The
higher the pressure and the temperature, the better it would work, and the more power could be
produced by a given size (and cost) of engine,
although the quality of workmanship had to be
better. However, Watt was conservative in this
matter, and never went to significantly higher pressures. He was greatly concerned about the probability of boiler explosions, a reasonable fear
considering the quality of material available and
the frequency with which explosions occurred in
other applications that used higher pressures.
The marine version of the beam engine often
drove the early paddle steamers. Such an engine
drove the Orizaba, a model of which is shown in
the main deck compartment of the Berkeley.
2.3.4 The Slide Valve
Every steam engine cylinder has to have
valves to control the admission of the steam to the
proper end of the cylinder when the piston is at
the start of its stroke, and the release of the
expanded steam to exhaust when the piston
reaches the end of the stroke. The first successful
valve system was the slide valve, and its principles
underlie all later valve systems.
Alongside each cylinder, the casting is
machined to a flat face. In this face are three rectangular ports, near the center of that face. The
two ports nearest each end of the cylinder communicate, through passages in the casting, with
the end of the cylinder nearest that port. The center port communicates with a channel that goes
out the side to the exhaust pipe. Bolted over each
flat face is a steamtight box, the steam chest, that
is filled with steam from the boiler. The boiler
steam would go directly to the exhaust port,
except that it is stopped by the slide valve. This is
like a smaller box with its open face long enough
to cover two, but not all three, of the valve ports.
When the valve is at one end of its motion, the
steam enters the uncovered port and goes to that
end of the cylinder. At the same time the box covers both the port to the other end of the cylinder
and the exhaust port. Therefore, the steam that
was in the other end of the cylinder escapes
through the inside of the box to the exhaust port.
The slide valve is made to move back and
forth, opening each cylinder port first to steam and

then to exhaust, while doing the opposite to the

other cylinder port. The valve is driven by a mechanism that works like a cam on the main crankshaft (the eccentric on most engines, but on most
locomotives an actual small crank, called the
return crank). For the valve to have its action
timed to control the steam, this eccentric as to be
set about 90 degrees ahead of the crank.
The dimensions of the ports and the lips of
the slide valve and the length of its motion have to
be very carefully designed so that the proper
amount of steam enters the cylinder at each piston stroke.
To reverse the engine, another eccentric
must be engaged, this one set about 90 degrees
in the other direction from the crank. The motion
of each eccentric on the crank is transmitted to the
valve, which is alongside the cylinder, by its
eccentric rod. The ends of the two eccentric rods
are connected by a curved slotted bar (Stephenson link) that actually drives the valve rod, so that
as one rod moves to the active position the other
moves away, so the valve moves smoothly.
2.3.5 Using the Expansion of Steam
We never fill the whole cylinder with steam at
boiler pressure. If we did so, when the exhaust
port opened the energy represented by that pressure and temperature would blast out and be lost.
We set the valve operation so that the steam supply is cut off early in the piston stroke, say at 25%
of full stroke. After that, the steam still pushes
against the piston, but with gradually diminishing
force as the pressure and temperature fall. We get
less power from the engine, but more power from
each pound of steam, which means from each
pound of fuel.
We still lose the power represented by the
pressure and temperature of the steam when the
exhaust port opens. We cannot expand the steam
in the cylinder to zero pressure, although the condenser is at substantially zero pressure, because
that would require an infinitely-sized cylinder. So
there always is some loss at the release into
exhaust.
It is more efficient to control the power of the
engine by changing the position in the piston
stroke at which the steam port closes (cutoff point)
than it is to reduce the pressure of the steam
going to the engine by partly closing the throttle
valve. Connecting the Ahead and the Astern
eccentric rods by the Stephenson link enables the
cutoff to be changed easily. As the link moves
from the Ahead position halfway (Mid Gear) to the

Astern position, the steam port closes earlier and

earlier in the stroke, until at Mid Gear the steam
port doesnt open at all. As the link moves further,
from Mid Gear toward Astern, the steam port
starts to open and close early in the stroke when
the piston is moving in the opposite direction. At
the Astern position, the steam port closes as late
in the stroke as it did in the Ahead position, but
when the piston is moving in the opposite direction.
Therefore, for efficient operation with different loads, the amount of steam entering the cylinder should be regulated by changing the cutoff
instead of closing the throttle. This changes the
expansion ratio. Early cutoff saves fuel by letting
less steam into the cylinder when the cylinder volume is small, so that it expands more times to fill
the full cylinder at the end of stroke.
In steam locomotives, where the tractive
force varies greatly from starting the train, climbin
a grade, running on the level, or descending a
grade, almost all the control, once the engine has
been started, is by controlling the cutoff point
instead of throttling the steam. Controlling the cutoff point saves steam, while throttling the steam
flow wastes steam. In ships, where the vessel
spends most of its time at cruising speed, the
Ahead setting of the valves is set at the most efficient cutoff point.
2.3.6 Paddles and Propellers
Mechanical power, from human muscles,
had long been applied to vessels through the
means of oars and paddles. Besides, there were
water wheels in which the power of moving water,
acting against paddles, was used to rotate a shaft.
It was easy to then visualize a rotating wheel of
paddles that would apply the power of a rotating
shaft to the water below it. The first steamboats
were, therefore, driven by paddle wheels.
Paddle wheels work very well when used in
calm water, and with vessels that dont sink deep
with a heavy cargo and float high with a light
cargo. That is, when the depth of immersion of the
wheel does not differ from its designed depth, as it
does when the ship rolls in a seaway or floats
lower with a heavy cargo. Besides, from the naval
view, paddle wheels were both very vulnerable to
battle damage and occupied valuable side space
that could be devoted to guns.
Therefore, from early steam times there was
a search for a different propelling system. This
became the screw propeller system, which is
unaffected by the rolling of the ship and by the

amount of load carried (within normal limits), and

which, with its machinery, can be below the water
beyond the reach of gunfire. The screw propeller
came into use about forty years after the first paddlers operated.
The choice between paddle or screw propulsion greatly affected the shape of the steam
engine employed, but it didnt directly affect the
technology used in the engine. However, since the
early steamboats were all paddlers, they had to
use the early technology. Later on, some paddle
steamers used the same latest technology of their
times that was used on screw propelled ships.
However, some other paddle steamers retained
the technology of the middle period right up into
modern times.
2.3.7 Superheating the Steam
To make a steam engine run, the steam supplied must have both higher temperature and
higher pressure than the exhaust conditions. As
long as steam is raised in the boiler, where both
water and steam exist together, the temperature
and pressure are linked. The higher the temperature, the higher the pressure that the steam creates. Such steam is called saturated steam,
meaning that the moment it cools off a bit some of
it condenses back into water and the pressure
drops.
That is what happens as the steam goes
through the engine. The engine subtracts some
energy from the steam, cooling and expanding the
steam to lower pressure. That causes some of the
steam to condense, so that the engine is running
on hot, high-pressure fog instead of dry steam.
The water drops dont produce power. Since they
take up less space than would the same weight of
steam, the pressure drops more and the engine
produces less power.
If the saturated steam is heated some more
after it leaves the boiler, then, like any other gas, it
will get hotter. Such steam is called superheated
steam. With the greater amount of heat that is in
superheated steam, more energy can be taken
out of it before it starts to condense. That means
that the engine runs on pure steam, with higher
pressure, for more of the steam cycle than it would
with saturated steam. That means more power
from each pound of steam, which means less fuel
for each unit of power.
Therefore, there were early attempts to
superheat the steam. With low-pressure, low-temperature saturated steam, the steam temperature
could be raised quite a bit with success. But as

boiler pressures got higher, with the search for

greater efficiency, as metals and designs
improved, the superheated steam got too hot and
the engines failed.
The problem was not that the metals of the
boilers, superheaters, and engines could not
stand the temperature. The problem was lubrication. As long as engines were lubricated with animal fat (tallow), temperatures were limited to what
the tallow would stand. Get it too hot, and it turned
to gritty clinker and scored the valve surfaces so
they leaked.
Therefore, superheat was abandoned after
initial success, because it was better to raise the
pressure up to the maximum temperature the
lubricant could stand instead of using lower pressure with superheat up to that temperature. Efficiency could not be improved through higher
steam temperatures until better lubricants were
devised. The history of technological progress is
littered with such seemingly small and unanticipated problems that have to be overcome, even
though science has told us which way to go.
2.3.8 The Single Cylinder Engine Crosses the
Oceans
The single-cylinder engine, using low-pressure, low-temperature steam, could cross the
ocean. The first trans-Atlantic steamers operated
by Cunard, Collins, Vanderbilt, CGT, and others,
were powered by single-cylinder engines, often
driving paddle wheels. The typical paddle-wheel
engine was of several hundred horsepower, but
the largest, on the last trans-Atlantic paddlers,
produced as much as 2,000 horsepower.
These vessels were much faster than sail,
but they required so much coal for the passage
that they could carry only a small weight of freight.
Therefore, the freight had to be of high value: passengers, mail, gold and jewels, financial documents, and such. While these steamships
established steam marine transportation, they
were dependent upon sailing marine transport to
deliver to their ports the coal that they used. They
were uneconomic for carrying the large part of the
worlds goods that were heavy and of low value:
coal, iron, wheat, cotton, and the like.
2.3.9 Two Cylinder Compound Engine
Raising the steam pressure and temperature
meant that an engine could produce the same
power with earlier cutoff, thus increasing the
expansion ratio to the same pressure and temperature at release as before. The cylinder and piston

had to be hotter at the beginning of the stroke,

while they were just as cool at the end.
An early Watt engine might accept steam at
40psia and 267F and exhaust it at 8psia and 183F.
Thus its cylinder worked over a temperature range
of less than 100F. A century later, steam could be
supplied at 180psia and 425F, and exhausted to
the same conditions as the earlier engine. The
later engine worked over a temperature range of
240F.
It was found that when any cylinder worked
over too large a temperature range, much steam
was wasted heating up the cylinder and piston,
which had cooled to the exhaust temperature,
back up to the temperature of the incoming steam.
The obvious improvement was to pass the steam
through two cylinders, first a high-pressure, hightemperature one, then a low-pressure, low-temperature one, so that each cylinder worked over a
smaller temperature range.
2.3.10 The Compound Engine Makes Long
Voyages
The engine with two stages of expansion
was called the compound engine. Alfred Holt,
about 1868, built and operated the first successful
long-distance freighters using steel hulls, screw
propeller, and compound engines. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, these ships
became successful in the Europe to Far East
trade, over distances long thought impractical for
steam.
2.3.11 The Triple Expansion Engine Conquers
the Seas
The logical extension of the compound principle to three stages of expansion followed as
higher steam pressures and temperatures were
found practical. One important change was the
development of petroleum lubricants that retained
their lubricating qualities at much higher temperatures than did tallow. Another change was the
development of reliable steel plates of uniform
quality for building boilers that could withstand
high steam pressures.
The first really successful triple expansion
installation was in the steamship Aberdeen, of
1881, for the England to Australia trade, about as
long a voyage as one could have. The triple
expansion engine proved so economical of fuel
and so durable that it took over almost all the
worlds freight business.
The triple expansion engine powered the
worlds freighters from 1881 until the last big pro-

duction run of these engines to power the Liberty

ships of World War 2. By then they were outdated,
but engines were needed in a hurry, engines that
could be built in any large machine shop, and, in
any case, many were expected to be sunk in the
war. They werent expected to last long.

2.3.12 Quadruple Expansion Engine

Naturally, as techniques improved, it was
seen that quadruple expansion engines would
come next after the triple expansion engine. They
did, but they were developed only for naval ships,
passenger liners and the fastest freighters, where
high power was required and only high efficiency
engines could do that without burning too much
fuel. The high-power reciprocating engine had
developed about as far as it could. The enormous
weights reciprocating at high speed imposed
severe stresses on all parts and imposed great
vibrations onto the ships hull. Naval acceptance
trials, where the engines were driven as hard as
possible to demonstrate that the ship reached the
required speeds, produced hair raising stories.
Not only the noise and heat, but the air filled with
water and oil vapor, the intense vibration, the
water flung about because some bearings
required cooling water hosed upon them, all contributed to a modern vision of Hell. The reciprocating engine was developed up to about 15,000
horsepower.
The development of the quadruple expansion marine reciprocating engine came to a halt
when it was overtaken by a radically new type of
steam engine.

2.4 Present Marine Engines

2.4.1 Steam Turbine Engine
As long as steam pressures and temperatures were low, only the piston engine could
extract power from steam. (The very first steamdriven device was a toy turbine, two thousand
years ago, but all that it turned was itself, like a
rotating lawn sprinkler.) As steam pressures and
temperatures increased, so did the speed at
which steam would escape through a hole, and,
even better, through a specially-shaped nozzle.
Such a nozzle converts the energy of the pressure
and temperature of the steam into high-speed
motion of the steam at low pressure. When there
is sufficient weight of steam per second traveling
at sufficient speed, there is a force that can be
used to turn a shaft that is fitted with vanes to

catch the steam.

The force exerted by a moving stream of
water had been used in advanced waterwheels
from about 1850. Most of these used high-volume
streams moving rather slowly, but one type (Pelton
wheel), used in mountainous areas where the
water could be piped a great distance downhill,
used much less water at much higher pressure.
The water squirted from the nozzle against a
wheel with cup-shaped vanes that reversed the
waters direction. When the wheel rotated so that
the vanes were going at half the speed of the
water, the water ended up with no speed at all,
and simply drained away from the cups, a very
high efficiency.
The steam problem was that one had to use
a smaller weight of steam travelling at much
higher speed. That required the technology to
build high-speed machines, and the insight that
the speed of the steam could be caught efficiently
only by doing so in many successive stages, each
capturing only a portion of the steams speed. Turbines, therefore, had to be rather large, and hence
powerful, machines. These problems were worked
out in the 1890s, and steam turbines were used to
drive electrical generators in central generating
stations.
Turbines first came to sea about 1900 for
driving torpedo-boat destroyers, the fastest ships
in the world. By 1907, the marine turbine was sufficiently developed, and so recognized, that it powered the British battleship Dreadnought and the
two Cunard liners Mauretania and Lusitania. The
Dreadnought revolutionized battleship design, and
the Mauretania held the worlds sustained speed
records (one day to three days) for the next twenty
years.
The turbine had many advantages that outweighed its greater cost. For a given power, it was
smaller and lighter, particularly when gears were
applied so that the turbine could turn much faster
than the propeller it drove. It didnt vibrate. It was
totally enclosed. It rarely needed maintenance.
And its bearings were outside the steam path.
Doesnt sound like much, that? It enabled the
steam temperature to be raised far beyond the
capabilities of the lubricating oil. Steam pressures
and temperatures were now governed by the alloy
steels used for boilers and turbine vanes, and efficiency climbed as the knowledge of how to use
such temperatures developed. (This author was
once engaged in the manufacture of boiler feed
pumps for a central generating station. Each
pump developed 3,200 psi, and took 2,000 hp to

drive it. Think of the power of the engine whose

boilers required so much water at that pressure.)
Marine turbine plants did not get that large, but
steam turbines drove all the large ships of the next
fifty years. The pressure and temperature of
steam rose steadily as that both reduced the
amount of fuel used and the weight and space
required for the engine plant. From the 1930s
through World War 2, the standard U.S. Navy
installation used steam at 650psi and 800F. Later
Soviet installations used 910psi and 932F, and the
U.S. tried, but later discarded, installations at
1200psi and 950F. Commercial marine installations were considerably more conservative. Power
increased up to about 30,000 hp per unit.
2.4.1.1 Nuclear-Heated Steam Turbine Engine
The nuclear powered ships and submarines
(like the nuclear powered central electric generating stations) still use large steam turbines. The
nuclear reaction produces heat, which is used to
generate steam that is used in a conventional turbine. The nuclear reactor, in this sense, is really
just a boiler. However, the limitations of the reactor
materials prevent the use of such high temperatures, and hence of such high pressures, as were
developed for oil-fired boilers. However, since the
cost of the nuclear fuel is so low, the lowered
steam efficiency is not that significant.
2.4.2 Diesel Engine
While the steam turbine took over the realm
of high-power marine engines, the reciprocating
engine lives on for smaller installations, but in an
entirely new guise as the Diesel engine. The
steam engine is an external combustion engine in
which the combustion of fuel in air heats water, the
working fluid, into steam, which then is sent to the
working cylinder to perform work. The internal
combustion engine uses the combustion air as the
working fluid itself, by heating the air directly
inside the cylinder as the fuel is burned therein.
In the steam engine, the steam, the working
fluid, is compressed by being generated by heat
from water in the boiler, under conditions of high
pressure. It takes much less energy to pump the
small volume of water into the boiler than can be
obtained from the large volume of steam produced. The high-pressure steam is then expanded
to extract its energy in the steam cylinder, or in the
nozzle of the steam turbine.
In the internal combustion engine, the working fluid is air. The air is first compressed in the
cylinder, then heated by combustion of the fuel

inside the cylinder, and then expanded. Compression of the air requires energy, but more energy is
available when expanding that air because the
heat produced by combustion has raised the pressure of the air. The higher the initial compression,
the more efficient is the cycle, just as high steam
pressure makes a steam engine more efficient.
In the last period of reciprocating steam,
some small high-speed engines were developed
for special purposes, such as driving electrical
generators. The mechanical solutions to highspeed operation, such as forced-feed lubrication
and enclosed crankcases, later formed the genesis of the internal combustion engines.
There are two types of internal combustion
reciprocating engine, spark ignition and compression ignition. In the spark ignition engine the fuel is
mixed with the air before it is sucked into the
engine, and the mixture is ignited at the appropriate time by an electrical spark inside the cylinder.
The initial compression is limited by the temperature developed by compression to that below the
ignition temperature of the fuel mix. The fuel has
to vaporize easily into air and has to have a high
ignition temperature. 100-octane gasoline is the
best available for this purpose.
In the compression ignition engine, the fuel is
not mixed with the air until after the air has been
compressed. Indeed, the air is compressed so
much that its own temperature is sufficient to
ignite the fuel as it is sprayed into the cylinder.
Such engines could use gasoline, but in practice
they use the cheaper diesel oil (which also lubricates the fuel injector mechanism). Because the
initial compression is so much higher, diesel
engines are more efficient than gasoline engines.
Therefore, for all serious marine uses, diesels are
chosen over gasoline engines.
Because of the high cylinder pressures, diesel engines have to be very strongly built. Also,
because the initial diesel engines did not turn particularly fast, they were large and heavy for their
power. However, because they dispensed with the
heavy boiler and its auxiliary machinery, the installation was lighter and smaller, as well as being
more efficient. Two lines of diesels developed. The
first were built just like the reciprocating steam
engines, but with many mechanical refinements
such as forced lubrication and enclosed crankcases. These first powered medium-sized merchant ships, and now are installed in sizes up to
20,000 hp in large bulk carriers.
The second line of diesels were the smaller
high-speed diesels that, from the outside, look

much more like very large truck engines and are

rather similar to diesel locomotive engines. These
power smaller vessels such as fishing boats, ferryboats, tugs, small craft of all kinds, special-purpose vessels, and the like. This type is also used
in those submarines that are not nuclear powered.

2.4.3 Gas Turbine Engine

Just as the steam turbine developed to overcome the limitations of the reciprocating steam
engine, so the gas turbine developed to overcome
the limitations of the reciprocating internal combustion engine. The gas turbine uses the familiar
sequence of compression of air, burning of fuel in
that air, and expansion of that heated air to produce power. However, in the gas turbine this all
occurs as one continuous flow through a machine
that rotates at high speed. The entry end of the
rotating shaft carries the compressor blades that
suck in the air and compress it to several atmospheres pressure. As in many steam turbines, this
is done in many stages of blades, but here each
stage contributes a small pressure increase. Then
this compressed air flows through burner chambers in which fuel is sprayed into it and burned.
The heated air, at the same pressure but much

greater volume because of the heating, flows out

through nozzles against the turbine blades. The
force of the flowing air against the turbine blades
provides the power to both turn the compressor
blades and to turn the power output shaft. Most of
these turbines use two separate turbines in succession, the first to turn the compressor and the
second to provide the output power.
As in all heat engines, the limiting efficiency
is determined by the difference between the high
temperature and the low. That is, between the
highest temperature that the turbine blades can
stand and the temperature of the incoming air.
Because the turbine blades are continuously
exposed to the hot gases, they run at that temperature. In a diesel engine, although the combustion
temperatures are higher, the cylinder walls and
the piston are exposed only intermittently to them
and are cooled by the cooling system. Therefore,
the gas turbine cannot be as efficient as the diesel. However, the gas turbine is light and powerful.
Therefore, it is used only for special applications,
such as in hovercraft, for giving sprint power to
naval vessels that would cruise on diesel power,
and lately, as efficiencies have been improved, as
the sole power plant for naval vessels of destroyer
size.