Safety valve

lever arm safety valve

Lever arm safety valve in district heating substation before the renovation. Budapest

The first safety valve was invented by Denis Papin for his steam digester, an early pressure cooker rather than an engine.[5] A weight acting through a lever held down a circular plug valve in the steam vessel. By using a "steelyard" lever a smaller weight was required, also the pressure could easily be regulated by sliding the same weight back and forth along the lever arm. Papin retained the same design for his 1707 steam pump.[6][7]

Early safety valves were regarded as one of the engineman's controls and required continuous attention, according to the load on the engine. In a famous early explosion at Greenwich in 1803, one of Trevithick's high-pressure stationary engines exploded when the boy trained to operate the engine left it to catch eels in the river, without first releasing the safety valve from its working load.[8] By 1806, Trevithick was fitting pairs of safety valves, one external valve for the driver's adjustment and one sealed inside the boiler with a fixed weight. This was unadjustable and released at a higher pressure, intended as a guarantee of safety.[9]

When used on locomotives, these valves would rattle and leak, releasing near-continuous puffs of waste steam.

Deadweight safety valve (1909)

Although the lever safety valve was convenient, it was too sensitive to the motion of a steam locomotive. Early steam locomotives therefore used a simpler arrangement of weights stacked directly upon the valve. This required a smaller valve area, so as to keep the weight manageable, which sometimes proved inadequate to vent the pressure of an unattended boiler, leading to explosions. An even greater hazard was the ease with which such a valve could be tied down, so as to increase the pressure and thus power of the engine, at further risk of explosion.[10]

Although deadweight safety valves had a short lifetime on steam locomotives, they remained in use on stationary boilers for as long as steam power remained.[11]

Locomotive Planet (1830), with a brass-cased direct spring valve

Weighted valves were sensitive to bouncing from the rough riding of early locomotives. One solution was to use a lightweight spring rather than a weight. This was the invention of Timothy Hackworth on his Royal George of 1828.[12] Owing to the limited metallurgy of the period, Hackworth's first spring valves used an accordion-like stack of multiple leaf springs.[13]

These direct-acting spring valves could be adjusted by tightening the nuts retaining the spring. To avoid tampering, they were often shrouded in tall brass casings which also vented the steam away from the locomotive crew.

Salter spring balance

Phoenix (1840) with two sets of Salter spring balance valves

The Salter coil spring spring balance for weighing, was first made in Britain by around 1770.[14] This used the newly developed spring steels to make a powerful but compact spring in one piece. Once again by using the lever mechanism, such a spring balance could be applied to the considerable force of a boiler safety valve.

The spring balance valve also acted as a pressure gauge. This was useful as previous pressure gauges were unwieldy mercury manometers and the Bourdon gauge had yet to be invented.[15]

The risk of firemen tying down the safety valve remained.[16][17] This was encouraged by them being fitted with easily adjustable wing nuts, the practice of adjusting the boiler's working pressure via the safety valve being an accepted behaviour well into the 1850s.[18][19] It was later common with Salter valves for them to be fitted in pairs, one adjustable and often calibrated for use as a gauge, the other sealed inside a locked cover to prevent tampering.

Paired valves were often adjusted to slightly different pressures too, a small valve as a control measure and the lockable valve made larger and permanently set to a higher pressure, as a safeguard.[12][20] Some designs, such as one by Sinclair for the Eastern Counties Railway in 1859, had the valve spring with pressure scale behind the dome, facing the cab, and the locked valve ahead of the dome, out of reach of interference.[21]

• 
  Paired spring-balance safety valves of a ČSD Class 252.0, with hand adjustment wheels
• 
  Midland Spinner, showing paired spring-balance safety valves behind the dome

U-shaped Ramsbottom safety valve

Ramsbottom valves on a model traction engine

In 1855, John Ramsbottom, later locomotive superintendent of the LNWR, described a new form of safety valve intended to improve reliability and especially to be tamper-resistant. A pair of plug valves were used, held down by a common spring-loaded lever between them with a single central spring. This lever was characteristically extended rearwards, often reaching into the cab on early locomotives.

Rather than discouraging the use of the spring lever by the fireman, Ramsbottom's valve encouraged this. Rocking the lever freed up the valves alternately and checked that neither was sticking in its seat.[22] Even if the fireman held the lever down and increased the force on the rear valve, there was a corresponding reduction of force on the forward valve.[12][23]

Various forms of Ramsbottom valve were produced. Some were separate fittings to the boiler, through separate penetrations.[23] Others were contained in a U-shaped housing fastened to a single opening in the boiler shell. As boiler diameter increased, some forms were even set inside the boiler shell, with the springs housed in a recess inside and only the valves and balance lever protruding outside.[23] These had obvious drawbacks for easy maintenance.[24]

A drawback to the Ramsbottom type was its complexity. Poor maintenance or mis-assembly of the linkage between the spring and the valves could lead to a valve that no longer opened correctly under pressure. The valves could be held against their seats and fail to open or, even worse, to allow the valve to open but insufficiently to vent steam at an adequate rate and so not being an obvious and noticeable fault.[25] Mis-assembly of just this nature led to a fatal boiler explosion in 1909 at Cardiff on the Rhymney Railway, even though the boiler was almost new, at only eight months old.[26]

Ross pop valve, from Tornado

All of the preceding safety valve designs opened gradually and had a tendency to leak a "feather" of steam as they approached "blowing-off", even though this was below the pressure. When they opened they also did so partially at first and did not vent steam quickly until the boiler was well over pressure.[12]

Cover of The Pop Valve, a self-published magazine by the American army Transportation Corps stationed in France in WWI

The quick-opening "pop" valve was a solution to this. Their construction was simple: the existing circular plug valve was changed to an inverted "top hat" shape, with an enlarged upper diameter. They fitted into a stepped seat of two matching diameters. When closed, the steam pressure acted only on the crown of the top hat, and was balanced by the spring force. Once the valve opened a little, steam could pass the lower seat and began to act on the larger brim. This greater area overwhelmed the spring force and the valve flew completely open with a "pop". Escaping steam on this larger diameter also held the valve open until pressure had dropped below that at which it originally opened, providing hysteresis.[12]

These valves coincided with a change in firing behaviour. Rather than demonstrating their virility by always showing a feather at the valve, firemen now tried to avoid noisy blowing off, especially around stations or under the large roof of a major station. This was mostly at the behest of stationmasters, but firemen also realised that any blowing off through a pop valve wasted several pounds of boiler pressure; estimated at 20 psi lost and 16 lbs or more of shovelled coal.[note 2][12]

Pop valves derived from Adams's patent design of 1873, with an extended lip. R. L. Ross's valves were patented in 1902 and 1904. They were more popular in America at first, but widespread from the 1920s on.[28]

GWR safety valve cover

Although showy polished brass covers over safety valves had been a feature of steam locomotives since Stephenson's day, the only railway to maintain this tradition into the era of pop valves was the GWR, with their distinctive tapered brass safety valve bonnets and copper-capped chimneys.

Developments in high-pressure water-tube boilers for marine use placed more demands on safety valves. Valves of greater capacity were required, to vent safely the high steam-generating capacity of these large boilers.[29] As the force on their valves increased, the issue of the spring's increasing stiffness as its load increased (like the Naylor valve) became more critical.[30] The need to reduced valve feathering became even more important with high-pressure boilers, as this represented both a loss of distilled feedwater and also a scouring of the valve seats, leading to wear.[29]

High-lift safety valves are direct-loaded spring types, although the spring does not bear directly on the valve, but on a guide-rod valve stem. The valve is beneath the base of the stem, the spring rests on a flange some height above this. The increased space between the valve itself and the spring seat allows the valve to lift higher, further clear of the seat. This gives a steam flow through the valve equivalent to a valve one and a half or twice as large (depending on detail design).[30]

The Cockburn Improved High Lift design has similar features to the Ross pop type. The exhaust steam is partially trapped on its way out and acts on the base of the spring seat, increasing the lift force on the valve and holding the valve further open.[30]

To optimise the flow through a given diameter of valve, the full-bore design is used. This has a servo action, where steam through a narrow control passage is allowed through if it passes a small control valve. This steam is then not exhausted, but is passed to a piston that is used to open the main valve.[29]

There are safety valves known as PSV's and can be connected to pressure gauges (usually with a 1/2" BSP fitting). These allow a resistance of pressure to be applied to limit the pressure forced on the gauge tube, resulting in prevention of over pressurisation. the matter that has been injected into the gauge, if over pressurised, will be diverted through a pipe in the safety valve, and shall be driven away from the gauge.

• ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) Boiler & Pressure Vessel Code, Section I
• ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) Boiler & Pressure Vessel Code, Section VIII, Division 1
• API (American Petroleum Institute) Recommended Practice 520 and API Standard 526, API Standard 2000 (low pressure - Storage tank)

European standard steam boiler safety valve

• ISO 4126 (harmonized with European Union directives)[31]
• EN 764-7 (former CEN standard, harmonized with European Union directives, replaced with EN ISO 4126-1)
• AD Merkblatt (German)
• PED 97/23/CE (Pressure Equipment Directive - European Union)[32]