Reply To: Porta's Derivation of Lempor Theory

[Martin Johnson]

Hi,
First, an apology to John (not Chris) who provided the links to other work on Porta arrangements. I have had a quick skate through spreadsheet link that John gave. It looks to be a fairly “verbatim” implementation of Porta’s paper, although the method of looking for a minima in the nozzle area is interesting. The section devoted to calculating steam flow is rather less good, relying on calculating cylinder swept volume, cutoff etc. but taking no account of superheat and hence condensation losses (missing quantity). Hence comparing “Romulus” (a wet design, if I remember correctly) with other superheated, full size engines is going to be rather suspect. There is also a fixed view (although the value is user settable) of gas to steam ratio. That ratio does vary, increasing as greater superheat is introduced – simply because more of the flue gas is being used toward superheat and less at evaporating water. It also varies with locomotive size – my own analyses shows that the air to coal ratio in models is significantly greater than that in full size.
All grist to the mill, though.

Martin