Hey Tom, Harry Schoell dealing with laws of physics is like the old Bugs Bunny gag: "I know this violates the law of gravity, but fortunately for me, I never studied law..."
It will sure be interesting to watch the stream of excuses that are going to start about the end of this year as the 1500 hp Mark 10 fails to enter "final testing".
Notice the condenser and fan are much bigger than the engine. In addition to the hoses going through the wall we can see, there are two water hoses connected to the rig, plus an electrical cord plugged into an outlet on the upper right.
Here's the control panel with the engine running:
The gauge in the lower left is "High Pressure", and notice the needle is near the bottom of the scale. Obviously the engine isn't producing any power at all with the pressure so low.
This is the best Harry Schoell has been able to do, a 5 hp engine that can run for a minute while producing no power, but needing to be plugged into the wall just to spin.
Now imagine that scaled up 300 times. Let's pretend that car radiator and big fan is big enough to cool the 5 hp engine producing 5 hp. If it's 2 x 2 feet, or 4 square feet, the Mark 10 condenser will need to be 1200 square feet, or 35 feet x 35 feet. The Schoell Marine building won't have enough electrical supply to power the cooling fans. The whole industrial park they're in might not have enough electrical supply.
Let's say the 5 hp engine could survive running at the 1800 rpm shown on the control panel. A bigger engine would have to turn more slowly to keep the piston and bearing speeds at similar levels. Engine displacement has to increase to increase power output, e.g., 300 times greater for the 1500 hp version, but displacement has to increase even more as the as the maximum rpm drops. Let's be generous and say the maximum rpm drops to 1/3rd or 600 rpm (which will still increase bearing speeds far beyond those of the small engine). Displacement is now 900 times larger. The linear scaling factor on all dimensions is 9.6 (cube root of 900).
If the Mark 1 is a foot in diameter, the Mark 10 will be 9.6 feet. If the Mark 1 block is 6 inches high, the Mark 10 block will be 4.8 feet high.
At 600 rpm, 1500 hp means 13,130 lb-ft or torque. A dynamometer that could absorb that power at that torque will be about the size of a pickup truck, and require its own major cooling facility.
But this is still if the bearing speeds are run much higher than is being done in that Mark 1. Running the same bearing speeds would mean the Mark 10 will run much lower rpm and therefore be even bigger.
And we haven't even considered what the boiler would need to be. That hillbilly rig Harry is now hiding behind the wall isn't going to scale up. Anything remotely large enough is going to attract the interest of the state boiler inspector, and nothing Cyclone does is anywhere near meeting the boiler codes.
So, yeah, as their former chief technical advisor calls them, Harry Schoell is "Delusions R Us".
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