history
Tragic Titanic raised steam power profile
Each of the two four-cylinder triple-expansion reciprocating steam engines developed 16,000 ihp at 75 rpm while the Parsons low pressure steam turbine aft was designed for an output of 16,000 shp when running at 165 rpm
T
he White Star Line’s first move towards becoming proud owners of the world’s largest passenger liners, Olympic and
Titanic, was made by managing director Bruce Ismay in 1907 at a private dinner with Lord Pirrie, chairman of the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. That evening he casually drew up plans for three vessels that would be far larger than any hitherto built. An order for the third ship was soon postponed but construction of the others was swiftly started. Olympic was delivered first and was followed by Titanic, launched at end-May 1911 and fitted out over the next 10 months. The sea trials of Titanic started on 2nd April 1912 and a week later the ship set sail from Southampton for New York. The rest is tragic history.
Three days into the maiden voyage the liner was lying at the bottom of the North Atlantic. Some 1,517 passengers and crew had perished after the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic had struck an iceberg just before midnight on 14 April and sank two-and-a-half hours later. Olympic and Titanic were launched at a time of aggressive competition by the great transatlantic steamship companies for supremacy in liner size, luxury and speed. White Star Line’s new pair may not have been the fastest but were certainly the largest and
16 I Marine Propulsion I February/March 2012
The triple-screw reciprocating engine and turbine installation of the ill-fated liner which sank a 100 years ago highlighted the drive for greater economy and operational flexibility from large marine steam propulsion plants
by Doug Woodyard
most luxurious. Design modifications made Titanic slightly larger than its sistership on completion and at 46,328gt the ill-fated vessel was, early in 1912, the largest ship ever built. To propel such a structure at 24-25 knots dictated a power of at least 50,000 shp but, as it was designed at a time when the steam turbine was still not fully perfected, the main propulsive power had to come from reciprocating steam engines.
Although still in comparative infancy,
however, the turbine was adopted for driving the centre propeller of the triple-screw liner. The port and starboard screws were each driven by
a massive reciprocating steam
engine, while the centre screw was driven by a low pressure direct-coupled turbine. The machinery spaces were necessarily
vast and extensive sub-division of the hull meant that the power plant was spread over most of the vessel’s 882.5ft (269m) length. Six watertight compartments were taken up by boiler rooms accommodating 24 double- ended and five single-ended Scotch boilers; further aft came the three enginerooms. A forward engineroom housed the two steam reciprocating engines while – owing to its great size – the exhaust steam turbine coupled to the centre propeller had to be mounted in its own room immediately abaft the reciprocating engines.
Located with the turbine in the aft engineroom were the main condensers and auxiliaries for the turbine, while a considerable amount of ancillary machinery was arranged in the wings of the forward engineroom. The third and aftermost machinery space was allocated to the auxiliary generating sets. The combination of reciprocating engines
with a Parsons low pressure steam turbine was hailed at the time as an example of great progress in marine engineering. Olympic, however, was not the first ship to feature such an arrangement. Harland and Wolff had already put the concept to the test a couple of years earlier in the White Star liner Laurentic, whose power plant reportedly yielded remarkable results.
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