STEAM ENGINES AND WATERWHEELS

[Stanley]

By chance I let the owner of the mill at Lothersdale a few weeks since and she is still trying to get funding to restore the wheel. It would make a useful electricity generator.....

[Stanley]

It's quite amazing how many defunct waterwheels still survive if you look hard enough. This is the Mayroyd wheel at Hebden Bridge which powered a substantial mill. I think it's a Fairbairn wheel.

[Stanley]

The Mayroyd Wheel still has the rights to an exit tunnel from the wheelpit which goes half a mile down the side of the river. The land can't be developed unless it can be shown that this tunnel is left intact. At least one developer got a nasty surprise when he bought the land for a new development. Funny thing is that the company that sold him the land never mentioned the tunnel.....
Tailrace tunnels were a good way of increasing the fall on a wheel as they were dug down to the level of the water source wherever it exited.

[Gadge]

A few Southern Hemisphere 'waterwheel' examples - Stanley, if you can think of a better thread for this post, please feel free to shift it.
The images are a bit rough, as I've just been given a flatbed scanner, and am still learning how to drive it, and the 'Gimp' image editor. Pics taken ca. 2008.

These are located on the site of the 'Maude & Yellow Girl' gold mine in Glen Valley, Victoria, Australia, on the Mitta Mitta River. It closed in 1952, and most of the major plant items were left in situ.

It's the only 'bush mine' site I know of in Victoria, that used mainly 'Pelton Wheel' water impulse turbine drives for its 'mill' [ore processing plant]. Probably due to reliability of summer river water flows - many Australian rivers have very low flow rates in summer.

The main water race channel was about 4.5 miles long, so I haven't walked it to look at the 'headworks' end! I'd guess its end was about 50-60' vertically above the turbine sites, so that would be the 'static head pressure' available. Of course, there is also a 'velocity head' component due to the flow of the water; the V^2/2g term in the Bernoulli Equation.



The auxiliary air compressor for the mine and mill. This is a single cylinder 'steam era technology' [i.e. it is a 'crosshead' connecting rod] unit, powered by a Pelton Wheel. Made by Thompson's Engineering and Pipe Co., in Castlemaine, Victoria. This unit would have mostly been used to pump up an air receiver to provide 'starting air' for the Ruston-Hornsby horizontal twin diesel engine which powered the main compressor - a 2-stage Ingersoll-Rand. This engine used direct air start, as was common in older stationary and marine diesel engines.

The new shed and walkways under construction in this pic are Vic Heritage grant-funded, due to damage that occurred to this site from the 2006 bushfires in the area. The timber machinery mounting beds were all burnt, and the gaps left are apparent in some of these pics.



Detail shot showing the twin water jet nozzles, and the 'cups' on the wheel's periphery. These are an early 'single cup' design; it was later found that a centre divider in the cups further increased the turbine efficiency. These turbines are very efficient in their best operating pressure range; well into the 90%'s.



Manufacturer's mark, cast into the compressor bed.



View of the turbine pit in the floor of the main mill building. The main penstock is the large pipe entering at the top of the pic. These turbines powered line shafts, to run the rotating machinery in the mill, including an alternator.

The basic treatment process was 'run-of-mine ore' > cone crusher > 20-head gravity stamp crushing battery > mercury-amalgamated copper plates > regrind > reagent conditioning > flotation cells. The cone crusher was powered by a small diesel engine; the Pelton Wheels ran the rest.



The somewhat bigger upper-level turbine of this set. I have some older [1990's] pics of this plant around, so I'll have to see if there's any useful ones among them - I didn't have a very good film camera, at that time.

Edited to fix image links 12/04/2017

[Stanley]

Doug, nothing wrong with posting that here! It isn't a private topic! In Gimp, If you put the image up as a JPG and right click on the image you get options. Colours lets you adjust brightness and contrast. Choose 'image' menu and you can 'scale image' which makes it easier for the site to deal with them. I always go for 800dpi width which seems to work well. This makes all the difference for anyone on a slow connection.
Pelton wheels were not common in Britain because the falls were not high enough for them. The most famous water turbine makers in the earlier days were Gilkes at Kendal and they made turbines with multi-bladed rotors similar to steam turbines. If you look up Newton in the LTP on Narrowgates Mill he describes fitting a new rotor in one of their turbines after the original was damaged by debris getting through the badly maintained screens. He said they were a marvellous construction. The repair was a success. Glass Houses Mill had a big turbine....



The head of the turbine pit at Glasshouses Mill at Pately Bridge.



Looking down the turbine pit at Glasshouses Mill. The large turbine is at the bottom at river level. This is the drive from the upright shaft.

[Tizer]

Here are some videos on the web site of the Westonzoyland Pumping Station, Museum of Steam Power & Land Drainage, near Bridgwater, Somerset: LINK

They still have an Easton Amos centrifugal pumping engine in working order, similar to the one depicted in this drawing (from Grace's Guide):

[Stanley]

The Glasshouses turbine worked on exactly the same principle but in reverse, the flow of water through the rotor produced power. I think they are technically described as 'reaction turbines' or 'impulse turbines' Have a look at THIS for the reason why they are also called Laval Turbines.
In my early researched on water wheels I found a Roman one on Hadrian's Wall that was a simple horizontal paddle wheel in a pit driven by the flow of water past it. A very ancient principle.

[Tizer]

The Stretham engine scoop wheel. Copy of a postcard with no details on the back, but 1985 scribbled in pencil.
Wikipedia page: LINK

[Nolic]

Stanley will be interested in this - possible closure of Ellenroad Steam Museumhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-ma ... r-32895571

[Stanley]

Thanks for that Comrade. yes, I am aware of it. I'm yesterday's man of course. What they should be doing is using their heads and going back to the foundation documents.... There are some very interesting consequences should the Trust fail which would cause a bit of a flutter in one or two hen coops. It could be cheaper for those affected to chuck some weight behind the Trust now than just stand back at arm's length.....

Back to waterwheels....



The Glasshouses wheel in 1979 when Brown and Pickles were dismantling it for removal and re-erection at Quarry Bank. Built in the mid 19th century it is a good example of how far the technology had progressed and how late it was still being used. They had come a long way from the simple scoop wheel that Tiz shows above and many of them were still being used well into the 20th century. Anyone who had a viable water resource was loath to abandon what was seen as cheap power. In the end it was the cost of maintenance and the availability of electric power that finally killed them. Mary Rose did a very detailed study of Quarry Bank and showed that far from being 'free' power, a large water wheel always carried heavy costs in maintenance not only of the wheel and associated gearing but the water resource itself.

[Stanley]

Click to enlarge. This is a perfect illustration of how illusory 'free water power' was. This the shaft of the Glasshouses wheel after it had been transported to Quarry Bank at Styal. I think you can see the complete fracture of the shaft behind the spoke housing. Harder to see but very evident is the story of remedial work that had been done on the shaft over the years. Notice the forged steel ring that has been added to the original spoke housing. You can tell it is an addition because it has been welded to the cast iron housing. There are also a bunch of very badly fitted wedges driven into the gap between the housing and the shaft. The story I was told was that the shaft had failed completely during a spell of hard frost, always a bad thing for cast iron but there may have been more to it than immediately meets the eye.....

[Stanley]

I know of at least two large suspension wheels that failed because of fractured shafts just behind the wheel housing and I suspect that the ultimate cause was only taking drive off one side of the wheel. If you think about it, a suspension wheel isn't a rigid structure and taking the drive off one side only means that eventually, as the component parts loosen up with age, you start to get torque on the cast iron wheel shaft and my theory is that this was what eventually caused failure. If drive was taken off both sides there is no torque on the shaft but of course it requires some quite complicated gearing to combine the drive from both shroud gear rings. It strikes me that this is directly contrary to the theory behind suspension wheels, that the light structure compared to size depended on all the strain being on the shroud castings at the periphery.
The old fashioned rigid wheel at Helmshore only drove off one side but it was a smaller diameter and far more rigid therefore it could stand the unequal load and torque on the structure. It never broke its shaft, only wore the pinions.

[Stanley]

The penstock on the Glasshouses wheel. Nothing skimped or cheap about this construction. The quadrant gears controlled large buffalo hide screens that blocked the shutters delivering water on to the wheel. The water may have been free but the construction that controlled it was very heavy on capital cost and maintenance. Good to see why, if you had an investment like this it took a catastrophic failure to persuade you to abandon it, especially if, like Pately Bridge, you were a long way from the coal fields and transport was difficult. This made steam too expensive. In the end this was what killed the mill, no alternative source of power and too expensive to repair the shaft because the trade was bad.

[Stanley]

I don't know where this was, probably at an ore processing facility in Cornwall. I like the way they have shrouded the wheel to cut down on losses from the buckets when the water hit it. I'll bet that increased their efficiency!

[Stanley]

My mid is surveying the transmission of power from the engine to the place where it was needed. In some mills, as they grew over the years, the transmission got more and more complicated and often became a source of trouble. Wellhouse was such a mill and the shafting system got incredibly complicated. Modifying them often got to the stage where a heavier shaft was needed form the engine (especially if power output was raised) and one 'cure' was to move all the shafting down the line a couple of lengths so that a thicker shaft could be used from the second motion. These were big jobs!



You can get some idea of the scale of the complications from this image of Stanley Fisher, the engineer at Wellhouse, attending to the shafts in the mill. One thing of interest in this pic is the spring in the mounting of the electric lamp. This was to try to isolate the bulb from the vibration when the gearing as running. Even the relatively modern light pendants at Bancroft had a spring in the suspension rod for the same reason.

[Stanley]

If you have a look at the Calf Hall Shed Company minute books on the site and chase Butts Mill through the entries you'll find that the flywheel on the big Musgrave engine was a constant source of trouble. I have always suspected that the culprit (apart from shortcomings in the construction of the wheel itself) was vibration in the transmission caused by badly fitted bevel gears affecting the wheel and encouraging the problems they had there with loose segments and keys. Another possible cause was that the teeth of the jack wheel gear were nit perfectly in pitch. This was a common fault with cast gears and you come across it quite frequently. When the segments are cast shrinkage alters the arc and length of the casting and it takes a very skilled pattern maker to get these elements right in the pattern. Newton once told me that the only certain way to get them right was to cast the segments with plenty of meat for adjustment and then machine them accurately and machine cut the gears. The most successful late engines had steel machine cut gearing and in the case of some like Pendle Street at Burnley were cut with double helical gears which automatically kept themselves centred.



A new second motion shaft made for Pendle Street mill by Brown and Pickles with the original pinion mounted on it ready for installation.

[Stanley]

By contrast here is a much older gear on a new second motion shaft for Sough Mill in about 1920. This is a cast iron gear which has been chipped to pitch in the old fashioned way. These gears were generally noisier. Newton once told me that if a gear was cast wrong and was out of pitch it was possible to improve the running but he said that it was impossible to chip to pitch and no matter how well the work was done, the gear would wear out of pitch again.. See the example of the Butts wheel for this problem.

[Stanley]

Rope drives became very popular in the late 19th century. They were quiet and flexible. Interestingly many of the tenants of room and power sheds didn't like rope drives because they thought they might be getting cheated of revolutions because of slippage, with gear drives they knew what they were getting. Actually this never happened because slippage in properly maintained rope drives was virtually nil. I know it's counter intuitive but greasing the ropes with tallow and graphite increased the grip and preserved the ropes. I have known ropes do over 50 years service.

[Stanley]

A few mills used belt drives, some of them made of steel. Newton tells a good story about replacing a large leather belt in a mill and the mill owner complained about the fact it was made out of multiple lengths riveted together. Newton asked him if he had ever seen a cow 40 feet long......

[Stanley]

One trap that many engine designs fell into was when flywheels became so large that instead of one wheel, two were mounted side by side. In most cases this didn't cause any serious problems but in others there were serious problems. Remember that on a big engine the unsupported length of the flywheel shaft was very long, on a big engine it could be over thirty feet between the support points of the pedestal bearings. Remember that a steel shaft is not rigid, no matter how heavy, it will deflect slightly in the middle due to gravity. If the two wheels were butted directly up against each other they could act as a stiffening element in the assembly and counteract the tendency to sag. Also, when the engine was running the centrifugal force tended to counteract gravity and the shaft ran true.
Problems arose with many preserved engines because they were run at less than designed speed and lost much of the benefit of the centrifugal force and the shaft flexed more. This tended to loosen the grip of the wheel on the stakes and they could move, sometimes quite alarmingly. I came across just such a circumstance and I think we lost the story when the site crashed. Perhaps I'd better repeat it......

[Stanley]

I wrote this on January 2001. I think it's interesting enough to repeat it.....


TRENCHERFIELD MILL ENGINE.

A few years ago (2000), John Ingoe called in for tea with Vanessa and Alex. Just as they were leaving he asked me if I’d like a trip out to Trencherfield at Wigan Pier. He had a contract there to fit some oil drip trays and there was a problem with the barring engine. I said yes and we went over there, I should add that this was with the full knowledge of Steve Redfern who was Dalkea’s site manager. Dalkea is the new name for Associated Heat Services and they ran all Wigan MBC’s boilers and steam plant for them. Part of his responsibility was the Trencherfield Mill Engine which was run daily for visitors.

When we got there I watched the barring engine running, identified the fault and told them what to do about it. Privately, I told John what I suspected the real fault was, they had piped the drains and exhaust into a system that was building back pressure on the engine. This turned out to be correct but that was that, problem solved.

While I was looking at the engine I pointed out to Steve that the keys were bleeding in the LH flywheel, a sure indication that they were quietly coming loose. I told him it wasn’t desperate but he should take note as it wouldn’t get any better. I said that while I was there I would have a look at the other side on the RH flywheel. (On a big engine like that there are usually two flywheels mounted next to each other) I walked round, took a look and told him he had to stop the engine immediately, or rather not run it any more. The RH flywheel was off it’s stakes and had been for a long time. What I mean by this is that it had moved on the wedges that held it on the shaft and was only jammed on the edge of the keys. It was very dangerous and they had parties of schoolchildren walking within ten feet of it!

I’ll gloss over a lot of what followed, basically Steve didn’t want to know, he wanted a quiet life. On the other hand, as I pointed out to John, he and I were under a duty of care and I had to send him a report which he must forward to Dalkea. I did this and the shit hit the fan. I was banned from all AHS sites for ever, John was threatened with commercial implications as much of his work was with Dalkea, in short, it all got very nasty. Eventually, common sense prevailed and the Council stopped the engine and invited me to go down and meet them. I raised another problem when I told them I didn’t want any payment. The concept of doing things for nothing, as a gift, completely threw them. This is still rumbling on, I have told them what they should do to rectify matters and they are ‘looking into it’. I did leave them with one uncomfortable thought. If they started running the engine again my duty of care would be revived and I would only have one recourse, to blow the whistle to the Health and Safety Executive. This would really put the cat amongst the pigeons because the whole field of running engines for the public is a minefield and if the HSE really looked into it they would shut them all down. Or rather, let’s put it this way, if I was in charge I’d shut them all down immediately pending certain safety measures. Take it from me, they wouldn’t like it.

[Stanley]

Before the Council decided they had had enough of my 'interference' we had several meetings where they quizzed me about the engine and in particular the flywheel. One thing they discovered was at least one crack in the flywheel boss and they asked me about that. I told them that in the first place they should beware of any 'expert' who told them this could be repaired by welding. As soon as I said this they looked at each other and the lady in charge (who was a smart cookie!) asked me how I knew that this would happen. It transpired they had already had an offer. I told them it was useless and entirely unnecessary because if they investigated further they would find that a massive steel ring had been shrunk on round the boss to guard against this common eventuality. They went away with a lot more to think about. The problem was of course that much of what they were making decisions about was history, lost technology, not taught today. I don't know what they did in the end but they were definitely Babes in the Wood when it came to engines this size. This is a common problem and I fear that one day there will be an accident with a preserved engine that will shake the whole field of demonstration of engines to its roots.

[Stanley]

One aspect of steam power that gets neglected is the effect it had on timekeeping and work discipline. They introduced fixed points in the working day when the engine started or stopped and as long as the engineer had an accurate clock and was honest in his timekeeping there were never any arguments. When the engine started in the morning the workers were expected to be at their looms ready for work and any that were not there were replaced immediately by a tramp weaver, a group of whom were always stood in the warehouse waiting for the chance of work. The worker who was late lost at least half a day's work so it was a strong and unarguable incentive.

[Stanley]

There was one big disadvantage to steam engines, if for any reason the engine didn't run, the mill was completely stopped. This occasionally happened and there are records of engineers being dismissed for running their engines so badly they broke down. Everything depended on the engineer and this is why a good one was seen as so important by the management. In the end, I believe it was this reliance on one man that killed engines. As soon as mains electricity and individual motors on machines became possible manufacturers saw a way out of this dependence on one worker. Despite the fact that the engines were actually a cheaper way of running the mill, capital was spent converting mills to electric drive.....

[Tizer]

If it were today they would be replacing him with a computer, regardless of whether or not it did a worse job. I notice in today's news that the crash of a military Airbus 400M in Spain has been put down to the wrong software installed at the previous engine maintenance stop. Each engine has its own computer and software to control the speed of the turbine blades. The plane took off but then the blades were moving too slowly due to the software error and the crew couldn't do anything about it.