Boiler

.: This is Athena

Photo of the test vehicle

.: The Doble Boiler

Doble boiler

.: The Doble Boiler

Abner Doble developed a flash boiler which could reach operating temperature in less than a minute. An added bonus is that if the boiler runs low on water, it can't explode! You end up with a burned tube and a non-working boiler. Back when Doble was building cars, he was able to get the comparable level of fuel economy of an internal combustion powered car of the time period (roughly 16 MPG). With modern insulation materials (like aerogels) and burner designs, one should be able to get much better fuel economy out of Doble's design, without losing any of the benefits of it's ability to rapidly heat up.

.: Boiler Blueprints

I do not, as of yet, have a complete set of blueprints for the boiler, but I do have high quality scans of some of Doble's blueprints for his boiler. The boiler assembly blueprints can be found here. The blueprints for the boiler coils are here. The rough dimensions for the boiler (housing and all) are 30 inches in diameter and 20 inches high, so if you're planning on putting this into a car with a small engine compartment, you'll want to make sure that you've got enough room to fit the boiler. This is why I don't want to mess with a front wheel drive car, as I don't want to have to try and figure out how to either resize the boiler, or cram everything in a tiny engine compartment. The one on my Chrysler is more than ample to fit the boiler in their, along with anything else that I might want/need to stick in there.

The water flows into the boiler from the bottom, and the flames from the burning fuel are at the top of the boiler, with a fan blowing the heat downwards. This allows the water to be warmed in what's called an "economizer" at the bottom of the boiler, and then superheated by the flames when it reaches the top of the boiler. This is a fairly handy way to scavenge heat from the exhaust. I intend to build upon this by coiling the water intake line for the boiler around the exhaust pipe, as well as running the exhaust pipe through the water tank. This will be better illustrated by some CAD drawings that a friend of mine is working on. Ideally, the water will be pushing close to 200F when it reaches the bottom of the boiler. The hotter the steam is, the more efficient the engine runs, so if I can have it at around 1000F or better, then I'm likely to get as much energy out of the design as is humanly possible.

.: thank you!

Thank you for paying attention this far. The site's always under construction, so check back often for updates (click "Latest News" to read my blog). I apologize if it seems like nothing ever changes, but I am not a web designer, and unless I can get someone to volunteer to take over handling the website, its going to take me a while to make big changes to this site.