20 Facts About Steam engine

Steam engine is a heat engine that performs mechanical work using steam as its working fluid.

The steam engine uses the force produced by steam pressure to push a piston back and forth inside a cylinder.

Savery's Steam engine was used in mines, pumping stations and supplying water to water wheels powering textile machinery.

Newcomen's Steam engine was relatively inefficient, and mostly used for pumping water.

The Steam engine used two heavy pistons to provide motion to a water pump.

The Steam engine cylinders had to be large because the only usable force acting on them was atmospheric pressure.

Watt developed his Steam engine further, modifying it to provide a rotary motion suitable for driving machinery.

Cornish Steam engine was developed by Trevithick and others in the 1810s.

The Cornish Steam engine had irregular motion and torque through the cycle, limiting it mainly to pumping.

Acme of the horizontal engine was the Corliss steam engine, patented in 1849, which was a four-valve counter flow engine with separate steam admission and exhaust valves and automatic variable steam cutoff.

Steam engine turbines were extensively applied for propulsion of large ships throughout most of the 20th century.

Widely used reciprocating Steam engine typically consisted of a cast-iron cylinder, piston, connecting rod and beam or a crank and flywheel, and miscellaneous linkages.

Steam engine was alternately supplied and exhausted by one or more valves.

Sometimes the waste heat from the Steam engine is useful itself, and in those cases, very high overall efficiency can be obtained.

The complete Steam engine cycle occupies one rotation of the crank and two piston strokes; the cycle comprises four events – admission, expansion, exhaust, compression.

Steam engine turbines provide direct rotational force and therefore do not require a linkage mechanism to convert reciprocating to rotary motion.

An oscillating cylinder steam engine is a variant of the simple expansion steam engine which does not require valves to direct steam into and out of the cylinder.

However, the arrival of electricity on the scene, and the obvious advantages of driving a dynamo directly from a high-speed Steam engine, led to something of a revival in interest in the 1880s and 1890s, and a few designs had some limited success.

Early valves could be adjusted by engine drivers, leading to many accidents when a driver fastened the valve down to allow greater steam pressure and more power from the engine.

Steam engine contributed much to the development of thermodynamic theory; however, the only applications of scientific theory that influenced the steam engine were the original concepts of harnessing the power of steam and atmospheric pressure and knowledge of properties of heat and steam.