Jay Carter was one of the most intelligent, nicest, and creative steam people ever.  A large book is needed to do him and his work justice, and so this will be a superficial survey.  Jay made his money in the oil business in Texas although along the way he made fiberglass hoses for moving oil from remote wells to a collection point. Most of his work was inventing filament wound fiberglass cases for the Polaris A-3 solid fuel rocket motors, both first and second stages, to be fired from nuclear submarines.  This resulted in a substantial weight saving over the steel cases that had been standard.  Toward the end of his life and in his retirement he designed efficient wind mills that were of the fiberglass, two bladed, downwind design.   These

   His two steam vehicles were similarly very creative and successful in their design.  Jay was always a pilot and he was inspired to think steam while flying into the Los Angeles basin in the 1960’s and could see the thick smog covering the city.  He was going to make a steam powered airplane, and so the first design, used in his square back VW, was a four cylinder radial.  This was not the optimal design because the lowermost cylinder tended to gather slugs of water.  The second design was a two cylinder, in-line, vertical, and so it did not have the water slug problem. 

    Jay was inspired by model carbon dioxide powered airplanes he made and flew in his youth, and so he was one of the very few people who worked with, and ultimately perfected, the bash valve steam engine.  Traditionally, bash valve engines used a steel ball bearing for the valve.  Many things happened, with most of them being bad, when a steel ball was bashed.  The square-cube rule worked against this design.  Metal fatigue and distortion was the main problem.  Jay ended up with a titanium Mexican hat design that got around all of the ball bearing deficiencies. 

    While many steam people start with designing a creative expander (the engine that turns steam pressure into rotary power), Jay did a lot of work with the steam generator (boiler to the common people) and burner.  It was a clean burn that was the whole purpose of using steam power in a place, such as the Los Angeles basin.  For example, “Black Wednesday” which occurred in September 8, 1943, was the early example there of dangerous air pollution.  By 1950 smog was identified as photochemical caused by sunlight, hydrocarbons and nitric dioxide.  The Los Angeles basin plus the cool ocean current created a temperature inversion of cool, moist air overlaid by hot, dry air.
     The steam engine, being an external combustion engine instead of an internal combustion engine, had a much cleaner burn.  It could have a lean stoichiometric ratio, whereas an IC engine needed a rich mixture to be spark ignited.  It had a large combustion chamber with long dwell time and good turbulence meaning that no unburned hydrocarbons were emitted. 
     Carter used a spinning cup fuel atomizer that gave complete modulation as a small amount of fuel could be atomized as well as a large amount, unlike the common gun burner that uses fuel pressure to affect creation of droplets of fuel.  The gun burner was limited to a narrow pressure range and thus a constant volume flame to work effectively. 

    For a steam engine, Carter’s engines used very high pressure and high temperature steam.  This worked with the bash valve because they did not require lubrication.  The bash valve let in a small amount of steam so that the engine ran at IC engine revs—up to 5,000 rpm.  Nor did it require complex valve train.  In conclusion, the Mean Effective Pressure (MEP) was similar to that of an IC engine.  Therefore, as much of the drive train as possible was borrowed from the IC engine business—clutches, gear boxes, electric starter motor—nothing in the drive train from rear end ratio through the bell housing had to be changed.  A centrifugal oil/water separator was developed to keep oil from coating the inside of the condenser. 

    Jay’s steam car ran for several thousand miles on public roads.  Most of the other steam vehicles developed with government money during the clean air craze, ran only on chassis dynamometers and while being attended by several engineers with gauges and computers monitoring the steam power system. 
    Jay Carter’s steam work is a fine example of what happens when a competent person uses their own money on a modern steam project.  It is also interesting, because his basic design of using a bash valve was not something used by anyone else.  Some tried to copy him, but without doing the extensive testing of the components that he did.  It is interesting that he was able to get good thermodynamic efficiency using the bash valve with uniflow exhaust and a relatively large clearance volume, which by default ended up with high steam re-compression, and with an exceptionally high expansion ratio worked so well.  He ran at much higher steam temperatures and pressures than other people did.  His combustion was so clean that when running in the Los Angeles smog, what was emitted in his exhaust was much cleaner than the combustion (ambient) air that was used in the engine.   By not taking government money on the first of his two steam vehicles, he was able to avoid the completely unnecessary government specifications that required the prototype steam vehicles to have power brakes, power steering, and air conditioning, along with a condenser that condensed all steam even at Death Valley ambient conditions, with all of the components fitting in the usual I.C. engine compartment of a standard automobile.  Thus, much time and engineering talent was wasted figuring out how to pack everything in, instead of working on the basic steam power system to achieve good fuel mileage.  Thermal efficiencies were possible if that had been the priority.  Instead, the government made everything else the priority, and then when everything was made and done, the government rated the success of the steam cars on the basis of fuel use efficiency.  Also, the development time was compressed and completely unreasonable given that the shop, engine design, machining and fabrication had to be completely staffed with experienced workers.  At that time there were very few, or none, technicians with experience working with modern mono-tube steam generators and with a completely clean burn being the main goal. 

  Jay Carter came as close as anyone did to making a practical steam vehicle.  When it was all over he said that having to pack everything into the existing engine compartment of the Volkswagen square back model made engineering development unduly and unnecessarily difficult. 

Do some research into the Clean Air Race.

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