Rotative Beam Engines
In a rotative beam engine, the piston is mounted vertically, and the piston rod does not connect directly to the connecting rod, but instead to a rocker or beam above both the piston and flywheel. The beam is pivoted in the middle, with the cylinder on one side and the flywheel, which incorporates the crank, on the other. The connecting rod connects to the opposite end of the beam to the piston rod, and then to the flywheel.
Early Watt engines used Watt's patent sun and planet gear, rather than a simple crank, as use of the latter was protected by a patent owned by James Pickard. Once the patent had expired, the simple crank was employed universally.
The first steam-powered ships used variants of the beam engine. These marine steam engines – known as side-lever, grasshopper, crosshead, or 'walking beam', among others – all varied from the original land-based machines by locating the beam or beams in different positions to take up less room on board ship.
Media related to Rotative beam engines at Wikimedia Commons
Read more about this topic: Beam Engine
Famous quotes containing the words beam and/or engines:
“What do we plant when we plant the tree?
We plant the ship that will cross the sea,
We plant the mast to carry the sails,
We plant the planks to withstand the gales—
The keel, the keelson, and beam and knee—
We plant the ship when we plant the tree.”
—Henry Abbey (1842–1911)
“America is like one of those old-fashioned six-cylinder truck engines that can be missing two sparkplugs and have a broken flywheel and have a crankshaft that’s 5000 millimeters off fitting properly, and two bad ball-bearings, and still runs. We’re in that kind of situation. We can have substantial parts of the population committing suicide, and still run and look fairly good.”
—Thomas McGuane (b. 1939)