Abstract
THE passage quoted by Lord Rayleigh from my book on the steam-engine, in some remarks on this subject in your number of the 18th inst. (p. 375), is taken from one of the earlier chapters, which is devoted to engines which receive and reject heat at constant temperature. When such an engine is used as a standard of perfection, by comparison with which some other engine is tried, it appears to me that the maximum and minimum temperatures of the working fluid must in the first instance be adopted as the temperatures of reception and rejection of heat; and in fact, without entering on questions reserved for discussion in a later chapter, no lower value than the maximum could well have been adopted. There is no doubt that the practice of comparing together engines with different cycles has been a source of considerable misapprehension, and very probably the language used in the passage in question may be insufficiently guarded. The use of superheated steam on this method of comparison is not a gain, but a considerable loss, for the heat might ideally all have been used at the maximum temperature, and is so used in the standard of comparison.
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COTTERILL, J. Superheated Steam. Nature 45, 414 (1892). https://doi.org/10.1038/045414a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/045414a0
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