Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1898 [PAGE 232]

EXTRACTED TEXT FROM PAGE:

2B2

UNIVEESITY OF ILLINOIS.

[March 8,

15. Tests on the steam consumption of different types of engines. Tne above list of experiments suffices to show the range of work done, under many difficulties, for want of a well equipped laboratory. This represents, I believe, good engineering investigation, which is possible only after a careful training in the use and manipulation of a large variety of instruments especially designed for such work. It has cost at least $900.00 to make the tests enumerated in the above list. Of this amount not over $250:00 has been borne by the University, the remaining $650.00 having been paid for by the parties with whom the department lhas cooperated in this work. In other words, outside parties have furnished the equipment and borne a large share of the expenses of the laboratory work in steam engineering. The results of this kind of work can not fail to be of lasting benefit to our engineering interests. It has opened up friendly relations with many manufacturing concerns and large corporations; it has place our graduates in good positions and in some cases has afforded a chance for vacation work to our undergraduates; it places the department in communication with state engineering interests, and helps to demonstrate, in some small degree at least, that professors of engineering are engineers. The future of our steam engineering laboratory work is exceedingly bright, for we now have a Steam Engineering Laboratory. The generous appropriations made by the Board for increasing our equipment will enable us to add to it very materially. Our relations to engineering interests about the state have been multiplied and the department now has arrangements for several important tests, enumerated as follows: 1. A series of tests to determine the effect on the fuel consumption of locomotives, caused by scale incrustation on the tubes. The Illinois Central R. R. will furnish us with a new and clean tube locomotive for our first tests and allow us to test same locomotive at the end of four, eight, and twelve months under same conditions. These tests will show at what thickness of scale it will pay to put in new tubes, as well as many ©iher disputed points in this connection. % A duty trial of a 6,000,000 gallon high duty pumping engine for the city ©f Aurora, Illinois. This is a triple expansion Nordberg Corliss engine and has a guaranteed tinty of 130,000,000 ft. lbs. 3. A duty trial of an Allis Corliss pumping engine recently enlarged for the city of Decatur, Illinois. 4. Test of electric light plant for Bement, Illinois. 5. Tests of "Serve tubes" compared with plain tubes, as to relative conductivity and steaming capacity. (The "Serve t u b e " is a form of tube used in all kinds of steam boilers. It is made at Sheffield, England. The company manufacturing this tube has sent this department four tubes and the **Big Four" R. R. will give us the four plain tubes for these experiments.) 6. "Locomotive Road Tests"-on the "Big Four" R. R. After several conferences with Mr. J. A. Barnard, general manager of the Peoria and Eastern division of the "Big Four," I think I have paved the way for a most advantageous opportunity for "locomotive testing," superior in fact to any offered by any technical school in the United States. Mr. Barnard ©Sers to cooperate with us in this matter and will go into it for a long period, say live or six years. He will fit up a special car to be used for this work m*ly. They will furnish locomotives for testing from time to time as either they.or the University wish to determine various points. They will fit up these locomotives, furnishing material and labor for such attachments as are useful only for this work. The University will have to furnish and mount such of its apparatus as pertains to the tests and that can be used in any regular experimental work.