Abstract
THE heating installation of a merchant ship is very different from that of a building on shore. An oceangoing merchant ship may sail into cold weather at any time of the year. In the course of a week she may sail from tropical heat into almost arctic conditions; and in a voyage of a month's duration she may sail from winter in one hemisphere, through spring, summer and autumn, or vice versa, and come into winter conditions in the other hemisphere. A paper on this subject was read to the Institution of Electrical Engineers on November 24 by H. C. Macewan. A difficulty of arriving at a simple method of calculation, like that used for computing the electric heating for a building, arises from the fact that the regulations quoted in specifications are very vague. Recently the British Board of Trade stated in its instructions to its surveyors in relation to master's and crew's spaces that "a heating system will be considered satisfactory if it is capable of maintaining a temperature of 60° F., when the temperature of the outside air is 30° F."This, although a useful help for making calculations, is insufficient as the basis for a test to show the adequacy of the heating. Mr. Macewan has collected data for the calculation of quantities and gives a general review of the problem as it exists to-day. He points out that the capital cost of the electric heating of ships is usually less than that of other systems as it is cheaper to run electric cables than pipes. In running cost also, electric heating is cheap, as it usually acts as a 'demand leveller' and it is seldom necessary to run an extra generator.
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Electric Heating for Merchant Ships. Nature 142, 948 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/142948b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/142948b0