Steam-Punk old R&D

The arrival of the cold and the first snow brought back from a remote corner of the memories an image of my very first professional R&D project during another winter long time ago.

I had just started my second job, after a couple of years struggling to make some sense in a Multinational Corporation I decided that counting beans every day and firing people every year was not in my nature.

And so I choose to join an experienced senior engineer and entrepreneur who was running his own R&D start-up, had plenty of crazy ideas and many of them with lot of sense, I thought.

What was then, my first project ?

“Put a steam engine inside a wood pellet oven; make electricity out of the heat that is produced there anyway.”

I had already thrown away in the bin any possible prospect of fat salary career, so what could a young engineer with a mind freed from big corporate b*s* dream more than that ?

I loved putting in practice calculations nobody was doing any more since ages, basic formulae of thermodynamics that some of us still learned with passion at the Uni, sketching pistons, crankshafts, dimensioning flywheels and boilers for supercritical steam… all in a small package that a grandmother could safely run in her hut on a remote mountain to get enough electricity to read a book in the evening while warming up her cozy place.

Of course there were discussions with Sig.Fornasari, the owner of the company, but he respected my ideas and was kind enough to give me freedom and support to design that contraption the way I felt right. Honestly I did not drift too much from the books: a water-tube boiler with two drums and a superheater, similar to what was on all steam ships long time ago (a masterpiece of stainless steel welding done by some old man nearby… you don’t find such things anymore) was feeding a single cylinder through a rotary valve ( and that was where the Boss gave me some really good advice to avoid painful losses of steam) and a simple cross-head crankshaft system to run a generous flywheel attached to a Ducati electrical generator. A very cute little devil to kick-start by sliding the hand palm on the wheel when the steam was reaching dangerous pressures and blowing already from various joints…

Unfortunately the client was probably not very pleased by the erratic behavior of the first prototype, they did not see it to finance a second one and took it away… or perhaps it was an excuse to bring it as soon as possible under their control to avoid paying future royalties on a potentially successful product. ?

I had no idea at that time that I was venturing in the very mysterious realm of Steam-Punk technologies, but that is our nature, to make stuff that in a parallel history (or universe) could have been totally normal.

And my Steam-Punk bug is still here… who knows what is boiling now on my desks among satellites, micro-rockets, thermionic instruments and… high voltage devices!