steam power

Examples of steam power in the following topics:

• The Spread of Steam Power

• Industrial Societies: The Birth of the Machine

  • Examples of the technological innovation of the Industrial Revolution include the invention of steam and coal engines.
  • The First Industrial Revolution, which began in the 18th century, merged into the Second Industrial Revolution around 1850, when technological and economic progress gained momentum with the development of steam-powered ships, railways, and later in the 19th century with the internal combustion engine and electrical power generation.
  • The introduction of steam power fuelled primarily by coal, wider utilization of water wheels, and powered machinery—mainly in textile manufacturing —underpinned the dramatic increases in production capacity.
  • The Savery Engine, invented in 1698, was one of the first steam engines available commercially.

• The Industrial Revolution

  • By the turn of the century, Evans also had developed one of the first high-pressure steam engines and began establishing a network of machine workshops to manufacture and repair these popular inventions.
  • Reliance on horse power for machinery in the United States soon gave way to water power; this resulted in a concentration of industrialization developing in New England and the rest of the northeastern United States, where fast-moving rivers were located.
  • Steam power fueled by coal, wide utilization of water wheels, and powered machinery became common features of the manufacturing industry.
  • This is the original steam engine design patented by Oliver Evans.

• Are solar voltaics right for your business?

  • If your organization can afford to buy several years of its power in advance while awaiting payback, and if your business is situated in a location that receives adequate sunlight then, yes, solar power may be right for business.
  • Note that energy from the sun can also heat water (and buildings) as well as drive steam turbines.
  • For example, calculations for concentrated solar power, which uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto a fluid-filled container to produce steam that drives a turbine, is cost-equivalent to oil priced at $50 per barrel (before payback) – or as low as $20 per barrel (before payback) when the technology is scaled up.
  • (Seager, Ashley, ‘Alternative Fuels: Now It's a New Game and Clean Energy is No Longer a Dream', The Guardian) For more information about solar power visit www.solarserver.de and click on the English translation icon at the top of the home page.

• Productivity Gains from Technology

  • Railroads evolved from mine carts and the first steam engines were designed specifically for pumping water from mines.
  • Railroads evolved from mine carts and the first steam engines were designed specifically for pumping water from mines.
  • Railroads evolved from mine carts and the first steam engines were designed specifically for pumping water from mines.
  • Replacing human and animal power with water and wind power, steam, electricity and internal combustion, and greatly increasing the use of energy;

• The Second Industrial Revolution

  • In the same period new systems were introduced, most significantly electrical power and telephones.
  • Railroads also benefited from cheap coal for their steam locomotives.
  • By 1870 the work done by steam engines exceeded that done by animal and human power.
  • Improvements in steam efficiency, like triple-expansion steam engines, allowed ships to carry much more freight than coal, resulting in greatly increased volumes of international trade.

• Early Steam Engines

• Electric Generators

  • Possible sources of mechanical energy include: a reciprocating or turbine steam engine , water falling through a turbine or waterwheel, an internal combustion engine, a wind turbine, a hand crank, compressed air, or any other source of mechanical energy.
  • Generators supply almost all of the power for the electric power grids which provide most of the world's electric power.

• What is Power?

  • In physics, power is the rate of doing work.
  • The unit of power is the joule per second (J/s), known as the watt (in honor of James Watt, the eighteenth-century developer of the steam engine).
  • Power implies that energy is transferred, perhaps changing form.
  • A coal-fired power plant may produce 1,000 megawatts; 1 megawatt (MW) is 106 W of electric power.
  • Tremendous amounts of electric power are generated by coal-fired power plants such as this one in China, but an even larger amount of power goes into heat transfer to the surroundings.

• Preparing for change

  • Having employees become part-owners in the change process by asking for their input is a powerful way to win them over.
  • The solutions they came up with – on their own included identifying and fixing steam leaks, reducing electricity consumption, super-insulating industrial furnaces and introducing real-time monitoring (immediate feedback from mechanical processes).