G
Hi Ian,\ said:
Yes you could run them on compressed air but you would have a very short duration for the size of a compressed air tank that you could get into a model boat unless you were thinking of high pressure tanks with a regulating valve on the outlet. The thing is with steam is that water is your available gas in liquid form that expands around 1700 times at atmospheric pressure so you have an available source of lots of steam, all you have to do is heat the water. With air you only have what you can compress into a pressure vessel, which is pretty limited unless you get to high pressures, then you need high pressure compressors to fill them.
I run my engines regularly on small air brush compressors with the engines above taking only around 15 to 20 psi for a fair speed but getting that into a boat maybe a bit more of a challenge. Of course if you are going to fit real engines you can't not run them on steam can you?
