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You Might Use Pulvensed Coan Although This Form of Fuel Is Confined Mainly to Land Serv- ice at Present, It Presents Possibilities to Vessel Owners LTHOUGH up to the present the Ae of pulverized coal has mainly been developed in conjunction with boiler plants on land, there can be no doubt but that marine engi- neers are carefully watching the rapid and successful progress which is being made in the commercial appli- cations of this method of burning coal. A paper entitled ‘‘Pulverized Fuel in some Commercial Aspects,” which was recently read by A. J. Taylor before the Institu- tion of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland, dealt principally with the re- sults which have already been achieved on land where pulverized coal has been employed. It also served to show the advantages of the system both from the operating and the financial. point of view, and it must have been in the minds of many marine engineers present as well as in the minds of those who have subse- quently studied Mr. Taylor’s paper that there should be corresponding advantages if some. system of using puverized coal ‘could be successfully developed for use on shipboard. So far, the use of pul- verized coal has made greatest head- way in the United States, and the pe- culiar position which the mercantile ma- rine of this country occupies in relation to the main sources of supply of the two vital fuels, coal and oil, would indicate that we have everything to gain by the successful development of a sys- tem for utilizing pulverized coal on ship- board, since the great advantages of this type of fuel can be summed up in the statement that both as regards the meth- od of burning and the method of con- trol it very closely resembles oil fuel, the supplies of which are more or less uncertain even in America. The question then arises, how might this- fuel be made available for burning in the furnaces of a ship’s boilers? It must be recognized at the outset that the possibility of taking on board bunk- ers consisting of pulverized coal while re- mote is worth considering, coal in this form being no more dangerous than oil. But if the use of pulverized coal involved the necessity of always having to bunker with this material, its greatest advantage would at once disappear. One of the reasons why the use of pulverized fuel is making such rapid headway is that the original coal employed can be of the lowest grade possible; indeed, the waste which at present is either left down in the mine or remains above practically un- salable is being successfully burned by this process, so that the ship equipped with this system would have the ad- vantage of being able to bunker at any port no matter how poor the grade of coal available might be. If then, the fuel as taken on board consists of coal in some form or other, no matter how poor a quality that coal may be, it follows that some equipment must be installed for pulverizing the fuel before it is in- jected into the furnaces of the boilers. In large power stations on land, systems have been developed in which all the coal burned is treated in one large plant com- prising magnetic separator, dryer, pulver- izer and aerator, and while of course there is obviously a certain measure of economy in this procedure, it would ap- pear as though the “unit” system in which a single piece of apparatus is used capable of dealing with every process between the receiving of the coal in the hopper and its discharge as fine dry pulverized fuel to the pipes leading to the furnace fronts is the system which will ultimately be developed for use on shipboard, a unit being installed in each stokehold. These units are now available in various sizes capable of dealing with from 500 pounds of coal per hour and upward, and in them the complete operation comprising metal separation, drying, pulverizing and aerating is performed, the apparatus be- ing driven by a single motor which is of only 12 horsepower for the smallest size mentioned above. The injection of the finely pulverized fuel into the furnace and its subsequent combustion is in many respects a similar procedure to that with oil fuel, except that only a comparatively low pressure is required for the injection of the aerat- ed coal dust into the furnace. It may be noted, however, that one of the greatest difficulties which has been en- countered in land installations where pul- verized fuel has been employed is the very high temperature obtained during combustion. This has involved the use of very large furnaces, otherwise the ash which is rejected from the burning fuel accumulates at the bottom in a molten or semi-molten mass. This would appear to suggest that the ordinary cylindrical furnaces of a Scotch marine boiler woul¢ be hardly suitable for use with pulver- ized fuel, although with small burners and a low rate of combustion the diffi- culties might not prove so great as in high capacity land boilers. The prob- lem of dealing with the ash, particularly if low grade coal is emrtoyed, is also 65 one which would require careful atten- tion. But the advantages which follow the use of pulverized fuel, particularly the lower fuel billjthe reduction in stoke- hold personnel and the greater degree of control over the temperature in the furnaces, all these are points which should appeal to the shipowner and man- ager, while the degree of success, partic- ularly from a financial point of view, achieved on land should encourage the endeavor to find a solution of the prob- lem of using pulverized coal on ship- board. Detroit Traffic Alone Would Justify Channel In the rivers and harbors congress at Washington a prominent place on the program was given to an address by Hon. W. P. Bradley of Detroit, on the subject, “The Great Lakes and the Industrial Development of De- troit.” Mr. Bradley reviewed the paramount influence of the Great Lakes in the beginnings of Detroit’s growth and the present value of the existing channels. He touched on the service established by the Ford company, by the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence, to South America, the Southern Atlantic ports and_ the Gulf. From that he went on to a brilliant analysis of the lakes-to-ocean project as it will affect industrial Detroit. By this route “Detroit manufactur- ers can reduce their annual freight bill between Detroit and the Atlantic seaboard from $80,000,000 to $50,000,000.” They can make a like saving in their freight to Liverpool. They can make deliveries in Liverpool in a little less time than it now takes to extricate them from the New York terminals. “The St. Lawrence waterway,” he said, “eliminating the Detroit-New York rail haul and the New York terminal cost, would pay for itself, from Detroit trade alone, in one generation.” Contracts have been let by the Union Steamship Co. of British Columbia for constructing three coastwise liners, two to be day passenger ships, and the third for service to Alaska. The vessels will be built by the Coaster Construction Co., Ltd., Montreal, Que. The new ves- sels are to be 230 feet in length. The day service steamers will have a speed of 15% knots.