Boiler explosions

[Bengt_Phorqs]

Great fun for $115 dollars a week! (1979)  

You made $115 a week?  I didn't make $115 in a month! (1969)

[Lucky_Lou]

When the airline I worked for (Midway Airlines) , bought the assets of bankrupt Air Florida, we got Boeing 737's, and the engines are in plain view of passengers, so passenger reports of oil leakage, became fairly common with the 737's .

Wasnt just me then!!!!!
Lou

[Vegasrandall]

I was on a 747 flying eastbound from hawaii to guam in the 70's and number 3 engine caught on fire and burned all the way back to hawaii.
It was quite a interesting flight watching flaming engine debris fly by your window for 40 minutes.
We landed safely and used the evac slides and ran like deer.

[wa1udg]

Holes in the Huey airframe were often repaired with Olive Drab "100 knot tape".  Every crew chief had a roll.  Lotta roof holes in the "Death from Above" business.  Floor holes not so annoying.

[Rob Valdez 79 R65]

I was on a 747 flying eastbound from hawaii to guam

Man! That is definitely taking the long route!

[wa1udg]

Is it not the steam tubes in a boiler which carry the pressure, not the big cylinder we normally think of as the "boiler?"  

[Johnster]

In a modern utility/Power boiler- The tubes carry the high-pressure water/steam, but the boiler itself has fans blowing into it and sucking out of it (at mine, the air moves around 60mph through the boiler).
  Ideally, you 'balance' the fans so that the 'sucking' fans run a big harder than the 'blowing' fans - this puts the boiler at a slight negative pressure (think in inches of water, tenths of a psi) - this keeps the 'fire' from leaking out.

   In a coal fired boiler, the explosion works like this:
  Coal is pulverized (made into powder) before being blow into the running boiler (the boiler is started on natural gas or fuel oil).  If, for some reason, the fire goes out- and you dont stop blowing in coal dust- you create a large build-up of ultra-flammable coal dust.  If you stop the fans (loss of electric power?) and subsequently restart a burner (with oil, nat gas or just a spark) it could ignite the coal dust and cause a large explosion.

Another way to blow up a boiler

[wa1udg]

As I understand it, Herr Diesel had intended to run his first engines on coal dust.  Fairbanks Morse made "semi diesels"  for stationary use in WWII.  Gotta Google that.  I don't think the compression ratio was high enough for self starting, they had to "preheat" a combustion chamber but without the use of glow plugs.  

[Dizerens5]

In the 1930s the French railways built a coal-burning locomotive with a high pressure boiler, could be brought to pressure from cold in about 20 minutes. Fuel was powdered coal. Try "Velox boiler" in a search engine. I believe it worked ok but failed due to very high maintenance cost caused by all the accessories including as Johnster says, all kinds of kit for starting up, restarting, blowing and idling.

[wa1udg]

And today they are in charge of what--- 64 nuclear plants?