The Birmingham age-herald., 1908-06-14
NEW ECONOMIC LOW
 PRESSURE TURBINE
UTILIZES THE WASTE STEAM AND SAVES THOUSANDS OF HORSE PoWER-PoWER IS MOST COST " FEATURES IN INDUSTRY.

While in the past, amid untold wealth of natural resources, America has beer wasteful and extravagant, the inventions which bring the greatest premiums today are those which utilize waste material and unused power. Power is the most costly feature of industrial progress The demand for better and cheaper power is increasing every day and happily the in- ventors are just about keeping pace with the demand by continually discovering ways and means to supply additional electrical power without adding to the cost
 The steam engine is the most extrava- gant device imaginable to transfer coal energy into mechanical energy. Not only Goes it require millions of tons of coal to keep it supplied with steam, but 1t can not use large precentage of the steam power. The power of steam is produced by expansion and the best steam engines waste considerable of this power in the exhaust With the engine operating under 180 pounds steam pressure and exhaustins at about 30 pounds pressure half the power is wasted. It was to remedy this defect that the compound engine was produced which uses the steam twice at a wonderful economy. That is the steam which left the first cylinder at about SC pounds pressure was carried to another and a larger cylinder and used over again, extracting considerable of the power formerly going to waste. The first cylinder of the compound engine is small owing to the high steam pressure, but as the steam expands to greater volume the second cylinder, operating at low pres- sure, is necessarily large. But even the compound engine, which takes up lot of room, does not get all the power out of the expanding steam and the loss stlll reaches alarming proportions.
 The development of the steam turbine a few years ago was long step towards cheaper power. This is especially true where the turbine Is used for the gen eration of electricity in central stations, power houses and the like. Electricity soon demonstrated it's superiority over all other forms of power in manufacturing, and years ago industrial plants began to utilize their steam engines to drive gen. orators in the power house while all the machinery was driven by electric motors. This plan did away with rope and belt drives, shaftings and consequent loss of power through friction. The turbine soon proved that 1t utilized more of the steam energy and gave more power for the same amount of fuel and attention than the old types or steam eilglIeS
 Figures show that steam expanding from 15 to 75 pounds pressure does almost as much work as from 120 to 60 pounds. An expansion of from two, pounds to one pound is capable of nearly as much work as the expansion of the same weight of steam from 200 to 100 pounds. Under high pressure the steam does more work per square inch but the volume is small; un- der low pressure 1t does less work per square inch, but the volume is so large and covers so many square inches that 1t does practically the same amount of work providing there is working sur face enough to use the low pressure en- ergy.
 During the last few months a new type of Curtis steam turbine has been de- ve1oped which is designed to be operated under low steam pressure. This type of turbine uses exhaust steam just as 1t leaves the exhaust pipes from a common steam engine. In other words, 1t is built to utilize the waste steam. To under stand the workings of this turbine if must be remembered that as steam ex- volume increases. From high pressure the volume increases slowly with a long drop the pressure. but when the low pressures are reached the vol ume increases rapidly with small de- creases in pressure. For a reciprocating engine to get full benefit from low pres sure steam would require the use of cylinders of such immense size as to make their use prohibitive through me- chanica1 difficulties. On the other hanA