Prime Movers
There are many options for the "prime mover" or motor that powers the compressor:
- Gas turbines power the axial and centrifugal flow compressors that are part of jet engines.
- Steam turbines or water turbines are possible for large compressors.
- Electric motors are cheap and quiet for static compressors. Small motors suitable for domestic electrical supplies use single phase alternating current. Larger motors can only be used where an industrial electrical three phase alternating current supply is available.
- Diesel engines or petrol engines are suitable for portable compressors and support compressors. Common in automobiles and other types of vehicles (including piston-powered airplanes, boats, trucks, etc.), diesel or gasoline engines can power compressors using their own crankshaft power (this setup known as a supercharger), or, using their waste exhaust gas to spin a turbine connected to the compressor (this setup known as a turbocharger).
Read more about this topic: Gas Compressor
Famous quotes containing the words prime and/or movers:
“If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“What is this love that more than all the cursed deadly or any other of its great movers so moves the soul and soul what is this soul that more than by any of its great movers is by love so moved?”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)