Re: Lamont Pump Ideas
Posted by:
Peter Brow (IP Logged)
Date: March 21, 2002 04:46AM
<HTML>Hi George,
Don't know much about canned motors, so can't really comment except that I wouldn't know where to begin designing one. Electrical engineering is one of my weak points -- designing impeller curves and other hydrodynamic components another, hence the appeal of a Tesla pump. Your seal & thrust bearing setup sounds almost ideal. The highest pressure shaft seals I have been able to find, though, are 250 psi, and I am aiming for 500 psi. Makes sense that a stuffing box would have more friction than a thrust bearing.
I currently plan to make everything from billet & off the shelf bits, but one of these days should set up my small Pyramid propane furnace & do some home foundry work. It has been in storage since I moved, hope I still have all the equipment. Crucible is like 4" ID x a foot tall, too tired now to calculate the pour weight. I think it will also run on natural gas, so maybe I should go hog wild and run a gas line to a sand pit in the corner of my garage. Though I might keel over at the sight of the gas bill. Even a small furnace poses a lot of problems for a safety nut (dry sand floor, venting, radiant heat, fireproofing, gas, etc) -- probably one of the most dangerous operations you can get into in a home shop. Then again, making your own castings, cool! Taking patterns to a commercial foundry is the safe way, but an artist friend told me what local foundries charge for small castings, phew!
May take you up on an engineering analysis. I'd have to draw up some halfway decent pix of the bizarre coil stack, words won't do and the current idiosyncratic shop drawings would be incomprehensible to anyone but me. It was originally designed for once-thru operation, & flow resistance may be too high for practical "Lamontizing". Sit down before you open the envelope. :)
One of these days, I am going to dive into my Scrooge McDuck vault and buy a certain heat exchanger engineering book at a certain local used book place. A vast, costly, ponderous tome. Then maybe I can train myself to do the analysis on these things.
Thanks for the tips; fascinating stuff, these Lamont boilers.
Peter</HTML>