Boilers
The high-pressure steam for a steam engine comes from a boiler. The boiler's job is to apply heat to water to create steam. There are two approaches: fire tube and water tube.
A fire-tube boiler was more common in the 1800s. It consists of a tank of water perforated with pipes. The hot gases from a coal or wood fire run through the pipes to heat the water in the tank, as shown here:
Advertisement
In a fire-tube boiler, the entire tank is under pressure, so if the tank bursts it creates a major explosion.
More common today are water-tube boilers, in which water runs through a rack of tubes that are positioned in the hot gases from the fire. The following simplified diagram shows you a typical layout for a water-tube boiler:
In a real boiler, things would be much more complicated because the goal of the boiler is to extract every possible bit of heat from the burning fuel to improve efficiency.
For more information on steam engines and all sorts of other engines, check out the links below.
Related HowStuffWorks Articles
- How Diesel Two-Stroke Engines Work - the engines that replaced steam engines
- HowStuffWorks Forum: Have you ever tried your hand at steampunk?
- How Diesel Engines Work
- How Two-Stroke Engines Work
- How Car Engines Work
- How Gas Turbine Engines Work
- How Rocket Engines Work
- How Rotary Engines Work
- How Stirling Engines Work
- How the Aptera Hybrid Works
- The Industrial Revolution
