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Georgetown Steam Plant
Saturday I finally got around to visiting the Georgetown Steam Plant, active from 1906 to 1964 and now a underfunded and underpublicized museum in the industrial area south of Seattle. I had never heard of it until about a month ago, after 9 years of rather geeky living in the area. It seems to be a carefully guarded secret of the local steam engine crowd, and they don't make it particularly user friendly.
'Museum' is a slightly misleading term. There aren't any displays, and the only pamphlets available are the 1980 dedication program designating it as a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark, and a 4 year old copy of 'Turbine Times', a local steam enthusiast newletter. The entire facility is open, with only some of the most precarious catwalks labeled as authorized personnel only. And the only guide, at least when we were there, was a rather quirky caretaker. He was extremely knowledgeable, however, and for once I forced myself to be social in spite of myself. I was rewarded with a very thorough personal tour.
This is the smaller of the two vertical turbine/generator combos. This is mostly just the generator section. The thick white pipe is the steam line coming into the turbine at the bottom.
This is where the steam comes in. Each of those vertical dealies is a valve, regulating the amount of steam. They are opened with tappets, one at a time, as the horizontal shaft rotates. The square bar at the left moves in and out according to the speed of the turbine. The faster it goes, the less steam is let in. A very pretty governor.
This is the drive shaft connecting the turbine to the generator. The collar attached to the rod leading to the left is the failsafe emergency governor. If the RPMS ever got too high, the collar would expand against some very strong springs, grab that rod, and pull shut the main supply valve.
Two boilers out of 16, 8 on each side of chamber. They were all eventually converted to oil full time, but original they could be switched between oil and coal. The coal was fed into the boiler room from a supply car on the roof, which could move back and forth between a series of chutes.
Pretty brass pressure gage on one of the boilers.
CO2 meters for the boilers. The alarm would sound when the percentage got too low. This wasn't for concerns over pollution, but efficiency.
The final turbine installed, in 1917, is the smallest and most powerful. Unlike the others it is horizontal and generally not so interesting looking.
The serial plate on the horizontal turbine. I don't think it was ever in danger of being used in an aerial craft, really.
Each vertical turbine had a vacuum pump to pull the exhaust steam into the condenser. While very sadly not running, these are gorgeous steam engines.
The gravity governor on the vacuum pumps. I'm not sure there has ever been a more beautiful widget in the history of technology. If I could invent a reason to bring these back, I would die content.
There was another set of pumps which pushed lubrication oil into the vertical turbines. They also lifted this stack of weights, which acted as an accumulator. In the event of an emergency shutdown or failure, this would keep pressure in the lubrication lines up long enough to to let the turbines stop without tearing themselves into pieces.
'Museum' is a slightly misleading term. There aren't any displays, and the only pamphlets available are the 1980 dedication program designating it as a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark, and a 4 year old copy of 'Turbine Times', a local steam enthusiast newletter. The entire facility is open, with only some of the most precarious catwalks labeled as authorized personnel only. And the only guide, at least when we were there, was a rather quirky caretaker. He was extremely knowledgeable, however, and for once I forced myself to be social in spite of myself. I was rewarded with a very thorough personal tour.
This is the smaller of the two vertical turbine/generator combos. This is mostly just the generator section. The thick white pipe is the steam line coming into the turbine at the bottom.
This is where the steam comes in. Each of those vertical dealies is a valve, regulating the amount of steam. They are opened with tappets, one at a time, as the horizontal shaft rotates. The square bar at the left moves in and out according to the speed of the turbine. The faster it goes, the less steam is let in. A very pretty governor.
This is the drive shaft connecting the turbine to the generator. The collar attached to the rod leading to the left is the failsafe emergency governor. If the RPMS ever got too high, the collar would expand against some very strong springs, grab that rod, and pull shut the main supply valve.
Two boilers out of 16, 8 on each side of chamber. They were all eventually converted to oil full time, but original they could be switched between oil and coal. The coal was fed into the boiler room from a supply car on the roof, which could move back and forth between a series of chutes.
Pretty brass pressure gage on one of the boilers.
CO2 meters for the boilers. The alarm would sound when the percentage got too low. This wasn't for concerns over pollution, but efficiency.
The final turbine installed, in 1917, is the smallest and most powerful. Unlike the others it is horizontal and generally not so interesting looking.
The serial plate on the horizontal turbine. I don't think it was ever in danger of being used in an aerial craft, really.
Each vertical turbine had a vacuum pump to pull the exhaust steam into the condenser. While very sadly not running, these are gorgeous steam engines.
The gravity governor on the vacuum pumps. I'm not sure there has ever been a more beautiful widget in the history of technology. If I could invent a reason to bring these back, I would die content.
There was another set of pumps which pushed lubrication oil into the vertical turbines. They also lifted this stack of weights, which acted as an accumulator. In the event of an emergency shutdown or failure, this would keep pressure in the lubrication lines up long enough to to let the turbines stop without tearing themselves into pieces.
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wrt the aerial turbine, John McPhee claims (and I've heard from other sources) that there was a nuclear powerplant designed for aviation use, but they didn't have a big enough plane.
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This can have its disadvantages too, like when the huge array of condensers has a homeless guy's encmpment nestled in there. For some people it's a recreation site, for other people it's a home address...