The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1853-02-01 00:00:00

THE CALORIC SHIP ERICSSON.

This new American Caloric Steam-ship, which uses
heated air instead of steam, as a motive power, and
thereby saves, it is said, 80 per cent. in the consumption
of coals, will make her first trip across the Atlantic to
London, instead of to Liverpool, as originally expected.
The following is a description of the invention, by a
French engineer :
The great principle which serves as its base of operation,
namely, that of the return of the caloric, has demanded
from the inventor twenty years' reflections to be embodied
in a machine. It consists in availing himself constantly
of the same heat to heat the air which is introduced into
the cylinders. The instrument by means of which this
principle is applied is called a regenerator, and a clear
idea of it may be had by supposing a man with his mouth
filled by hot metallic sponge. If he draw breath, the
outer air, in traversing the pores of the warm sponge, will
be heated, and will arrive in the lungs warm, whilst the
sponge having yielded its caloric, will become cold. If he
make a respiration of this hot air. it, in passing again
through the sponge, will heat the latter, and will arrive at
the other side cold again. If, instead of the individual
producing these movements by the contractions of the
muscles of his breast, a common bellows be fitted to
his mouth to produce the action of breathing and res-
piring, we have almost Erlcsson's machine.
This machine is composed of two vertical cylinders, one
placed over the other. The lower one is the working
cylinder—the upper one is a pump, which compresses the
air into a reservoir placed over it. This reservoir and cy-
linder are united by a tube which passes through the re-
generator, and is provided with ordinary valves to open or
close the communication. Under the cylinder there is a
fire-place.
The fire being lighted, the first operation for setting
the machine to work is by an outer means to compress
the air into a reservoir. That done, the communication
with the cylinder is opened—the air being precipitated
into it, driving the piston upward ; and as this piston is
connected by iron trucks with that of the pump, the lat-
ter immediately compresses into the reservoir the quan-
tity of air which has left it. The surface of the mover
being almost double that of the pump, the air has taken
by contact with the bottom of the cylinder the quantity of
heat necessary to double its volume in conserving its pres-
sure. Half of the force contained in this compressed air
is employed by the pump to compress cold air; the other
half constitutes the power of the machine.
When the piston reaches the top of its course, the
valves are worked in such a manner as to close the reser-
voir of cold air, and to let the hot air escape from the cy-
linder through the regenerator. This air is cooled in it
before reaching the atmosphere, and leaves its heat in
store. The weight of the piston is sufficient to produce
this result, and to draw it itself to the bottom of the cy-
linder. The valves being restored to their proper posi-
tion, the piston ascends again ; but from that moment the
air, which passes from the reservoir to the cylinder, be-
coming heated in passing through the regenerator, the
hot bottom of the cylinder has no longer aught to do save
to supply the small quantity of heat of which it has been
deprived by the air driven off, and that lost by radiation
from the hot surface.
The construction of the Ericsson is not a commercial
enterprise—it is an experiment in science upon a gigantic
scale. The hull of the ship, remarkable for the perfection
of its model, is 250 feet in length, 40 feet breadth of
beam, and 27 feet depth of hold. Over the deck rise four
funnels, 30 inches in diameter, and only 12 feet in
height. Two of them serve as chimneys—the other two
serve to let out the air which leaves the regenerators.
The wheels are 32 feet in diameter, and 10 feet in breadth.
Cylinder and Piston.—The cylinders are fourteen feet
in diameter, and the piston has six feet stroke. Hardly
a year since, the largest cylinders that had ever been cast
were eight feet in diameter, and the possibility of casting
larger ones without defects was doubted. Another diffi-
culty, declared by many persons to be insurmountable,
was that of preventing the pistons from becoming hot, a
circumstance which would destroy the gear by preventing
its being greased. The pistons are hollow boxes, flat on
top and concave beneath ; their size at the top is six feet,
but the gear only occupies the upper portion. The inte-
rior of the pistons is filled with plaster and coal bodies,
which are bad conductors of heat. This arrangement has
succeeded so well that the heat of the apparatus is hardly
great enough to melt fat.
The Fires and Bottoms of the Cylinders.—The bottom
of the cylinders is a convex surface above, and formed in
such a manner as to be exactly inclosed in the piston when
it descends. This bottom is an inch and a-half in thick-
ness, and is heated by means of the fire of anthracite or
coke, placed five feet lower. This distance has been
adopted so that the bottom would not redden, and it has
answered so well the purpose expected from it, that it is
already supposed that the bottoms will be able, though in
contact with the air, to endure longer than four years, the
average duration of steam boilers in the United States.

Regenerator.—This part of the apparatus, undoubtedly
the most remarkable, is that which has been the first in-
vented, and has since given the least embarrassment to
the inventor. The regenerator is composed of a series of
metallic nets, placed parallel to each other in a box six
feet in breadth by four in height. Each of the nets con-
tain, therefore, twenty-four square feet ; there are 200 of
them for each cylinder, that is, almost 20,000 square feet,
The number of meshes is computed at a hundred million ;
the threads of the nets are about the sixteenth of an inch
in diameter.

Pressure and Temperature.—The pressure which has
been found the most advantageous, is that of 121bs. to
the square inch—that is to say, a little more than an at-
mosphere. The highest temperature to which the air is
elevated in the interior of the cylinder is 384 deg. Faren-
lieit. To double its volume it would be necessary that it
should attain to 450 deg. ; but this degree of temperature
would cause inconveniences which it is desirable to avoid.
When the air, after having done the work assigned to it
in the machine, is expelled from the vessel, its heat is only
30 deg. greater than the outer temperature. When the
machine gives fifteen strokes per minute, the quantity of
air used by the machinery is equal to seventy-five tons an
hour. With that datum the quantity of heat carried
away by the rejected air may be calculated by recollecting
that the calorific capacity of the element is only one-
fourth part that of water.
The Stop.—An essential, though not apparent arrange-
ment, is that of the apparatus of the stop, which, in
closing the valve before the end of the stroke, permits
the employment of the air's power of expansion. In the
pump, the air taken by the exterior pressure does not
attain to the pressure of 12 lbs. until the piston has
traversed thirty inches of its course. In the cylinder,
the pressure is 12 lbs. per inch during the two-thirds of
its course : the valve is then closed, and the last third is
worked by the expansive power of the air. But to get 12
lbs. of real pressure, as there is on one side of the piston
15 lbs. of atmospheric pressure, there is from within 27
lbs. of pressure ; this, detained in the proportion of two
to three, leaves at the end of the course 18 lbs. This is
only 3 lbs. per inch over the ordinary pressure.
The other parts of the new machine present no disposi-
tion thatappears deservingof being particularly mentioned.
Mr. Ericsson states that his ship will only consume six
tons of charcoal in the twenty-four hours in the prodtic.
tion of a 600 horse power. The exactitude of these calcu-
lations ulna yet receive the Denctien a experience.