daves101:
We are dealing with an 1830's steam engine. Your drawings do not show a "surface condenser". A surface condenser is the shell-and-tube type. In a surface condenser, the steam is directed into the shell of the condenser, and the cooling water passes thru the tubes. In order to work properly, a steam surface condenser has a LOT of small diameter tubes. Even a small surface condenser would have had a few hundred small diameter tubes. The tubes are made of a copper alloy, and one in particular, named "Admiralty metal" was developed early on for condenser tubes on sea going vessels. The tubes are rolled (expanded) into the tube sheets.
A surface condenser has "nests of tubes" with "steam lanes" between them (spaces between clusters of tubes) to direct the steam onto all of the tubes in the condenser. A surface condenser also has "waterboxes". These are box shaped (or semi-circular, or whatever the design called for) housings which bolt up to the tube sheets. Cooling water (known as "circulating water" whether aboard ship or on land) is pumped into one water box, makes a pass thru the tubes and goes out the other water box on the other side of the condenser shell.
Look over your drawings and see if there are two (2) pipe connections aside from the exhaust steam inlet and condensate discharge.
Getting back to an 1830's mindset, it was not unheard of to run seawater into boilers. Boilers operated at extremely low pressures in those days. Questions and answers for marine engineers from the mid 1800's will often speak of using seawater as makeup feed in an emergency to get a ship's plant going again. Bear in mind that a sea going ship would carry makeup water in tanks. I do not know anything about the "Mississippi". From the era, I would guess it was a wooden hulled vessel with a rig for sails as well as the paddlewheels/steam engine. Early vessels of this era relied on sails moreso than the steam plants as they sometimes could not carry enough coal for long voyages.
I am no historian, but from the looks of your drawings, I would not be surprised if you are dealing with a direct-contact type of condenser. If we consider the "Mississippi" as one of those vessels that was primarily a sailing ship with a steam plant, we think of the steam plant similar to the auxiliary engine on a modern sailing vessel. This means the plant did not run continuously, or ran at low load to augment the sails. If we continue the line of thinking that the condenser was a direct contact condenser, then we wind up with a condensate that is diluted sea water. As the steam plant would continue to be run, the salinity of the condensate is going to rise, so fresh makeup water from the ship's tankage would be introduced into the system. Again, remember this is the 1830's. Steam propulsion was a relatively new technology, and low working pressures were the norm. Even boiler designs were still being developed for marine, stationary and railroad applications. KNowledge of things like boiler water chemistry was in its infancy, if it existed at all. A lot of crazy folk wisdom (if you could call it that) was in use in all areas of steam power back then. Water treatment, if it existed, often consisted of putting tanbark in the hotwell or putting anything else that was being talked about at the time. A low pressure boiler would "salt up" in time, even with running diluted sea water as feedwater. When the ship made port, the boilers would be opened for cleaning. Again, this is the 1830's, and the more traditional firetube boilers had not come into being. A boiler like the Scotch Marine type of firetube boiler would be impossible to clean the "waterside" between all the firetubes, or the rear and sides of the combustion chamber. An early marine boiler might well have taken its design from something like a Lancashire boiler. A man could get in via a manway and scale off the inner walls of the boiler barrel, the outer surfaces of the furnaces, and "punch out" the cross tubes. This would be a regular job whenever the ship tied up in port and the boilers could be cooled down and opened up. Again, think like you were in the 1830's. Crazy folk wisdom prevailed, and one source suggested adding kerosene to a boiler to help soften the scale. Imagine you were a crewman in the black gang on that ship. As soon as the boilers had cooled down sufficiently, you wriggled in a manway, took a stump of a candle for light, and started scraping off the accumulated salt/scale from the inner surfaces of the boiler. Your only safety device was your candle. If it went out, you did not have enough oxygen in the ambient air inside that boiler. Hopefully, you would still be conscious and able to get to the manway and out of the boiler to survive.
Salt/scale in a marine boiler in the 1830's was probably a fact of life. In a wooden hulled ship, the tankage was limited. No double bottoms or tankage integral with the ship's hull. They could have carried makeup water in wooden hogsheads or similar.
Next, we have to ask where and how the circulating water made it into the condenser. The answer is a circulating pump. This is known aboard ships as a "condenser circulator", and even in more advanced steam days, was a centrifugal pump driven by its own steam engine. On older vessels, the circulator would be a plunger or piston type of pump driven by some kind of "monkey motion" (another marine engineer's term) from the crosshead of the main engine. The circulator would have a large bore pump cylinder and flapper valves like a shallow well pump. It had to move large volumes of water to condense the steam. The circulator took suction from overboard (thru the hull) and there would have been a "sea chest" bolted to the inside of the ship's hull. There would have been a large diameter circulating water suction pipe, and an isolation valve located right at or close to the thru hull fitting. Possibly, the sea chest would also have a cleanable strainer. The sea chest would be made of cast bronze, and the circulating water piping- even well into the 20th century- would be large diameter/thin walled copper. Some of this pipe was made by rolling copper plate to form the pipe and using lapped/riveted seams. Flanged joints were used. A common method of attaching a pipe flange in the pre-welding/pre-torch brazing days was to use a "floating flange". A bronze flange bored to slip onto the copper circulating water pipe would be made a radius on the edge of the bore on the seating face of the flange. The copper pipe would be flared so that the end of the pipe was formed over this radius and flanged flat. This surface was then filed and scraped to flatness to make a good seating for a gasket. In later years, this became known as a "van Stone joint".
If you put your mindset in the 1830's, think in terms of not having any portable power tools- no hand held power drills or grinders, no magnetic based drills, no air die grinders. In the machine shop you had basic lathes, boring mills, drill presses, and planers and shapers. No vertical mills, probably no horizontal mills, and all cutting tools were likely hand forged in the shop. Drills might well have been hand forged "spade" type drills. If a casting could not be gotten into a machine tool for machining a surface, it was done in place by hand. Old accounts of shop work from this era recall having to manually finish the port faces on steam cylinders since no method existed for machining them. A machinist or apprentice would use a hammer and cape chisel to rough=down the port face to something near final dimension and relative flatness. After that, it was a matter of filing and hand scraping. Steam ports were finished out by these same methods.
Brazing for joining some of the copper pipe and fittings was done in a forge fire using "spelter" (a mixture of copper and zinc and maybe some tin- roughly equivalent to today's 'low fuming bronze' brazing alloys).
N
Think like the 1830's and you will be ahead of the game with your engine design.