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Period cutaway diagram of a triple-expansion steam engine installation, circa 1918. This particular diagram illustrates possible engine cutoff locations, after the Lusitania disaster and others made it clear that this was an important safety feature. A marine steam engine is a steam engine that is used to power a ship or boat.
Double-acting triple-expansion marine engine. High-pressure steam (red) passes through three stages, exhausting as low-pressure steam (blue) to the condenser. It is a logical extension of the compound engine (described above) to split the expansion into yet more stages to increase efficiency. The result is the multiple-expansion engine.
The image in this section shows an animation of a triple-expansion engine. The steam travels through the engine from left to right. The valve chest for each of the cylinders is to the left of the corresponding cylinder. [citation needed] Land-based steam engines could exhaust their steam to atmosphere, as feed water was usually readily available.
Engine No 6, also called The Sir William Prescott, has been restored to running order and is the largest fully operational triple-expansion steam engine in the world. [4] It may be seen in steam on various weekends throughout the year, and as a static display every Sunday between March and November. [5]
The engine itself is of an unusual triple-expansion, three-crank rocker design, with pistons 13.7, 24.375, and 39 inches (348.0, 619.1, and 990.6 mm) in diameter and 6-foot (1.8 m) stroke. Each rocker is connected both to a crankshaft with a 15-foot (4.6 m) flywheel and to a double acting pump's plunger.
In a triple-expansion steam engine, the steam passes through three successive cylinders of increasing size and decreasing pressure. Such engines were the most common marine engines in the golden age of steam. These examples and compound turbines are the main but not the only uses of compounding in engines, see below.
This engine layout with triple expansion via four cylinders was clearly successful and was fitted into a range of ships, including the four Drake-class cruisers of 1901, which with 43 Belleville boilers produced 30,000 ihp and 23 knots. Four-cylinder triple-expansion engines were also fitted in HMS Carnarvon, built on the Clyde. In her trials ...
The solution was the triple expansion engine, in which steam was successively expanded in a high pressure, intermediate pressure and a low pressure cylinder. [ 27 ] : 89 [ 28 ] : 106-111 The theory of this was established in the 1850s by John Elder , but it was clear that triple expansion engines needed steam at, by the standards of the day ...