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gas turbines in John Deere

P

Prawn Farmer

Member
Met an old feller in Florida last week that had worked in marketing for John Deere and said that they had experimented with a gas turbine engine installed in a scraper at their Debuque, Iowa plant back in the mid-60's sometime. He said it would really bury the pan and dirt would just pour out the back. He didn't remember much on the details but thought the engine was either an Allison or AirResearch. He was employed by the construction equipment division but thought they had also tried some other alternative form of engine in a 5020. I knew IH and Ford had built a couple of turbine tractors but didn't know that John Deere had, too. Wonder if Allis, Oliver or MM had also experimented with different engines?
 
Back in the 70's a Deere service rep told me that he was at the Deere test farm and saw a Deere looking 4230 with a gas turbine engine in it setting in dead row, he did not hear it run. It had apparently been in a research and development program and did not make the cut..I would love to take a walk down that Dead row....
 

High HP per lb weight of an engine makes for a good aircraft a good aircraft engine but a lousy tracror engine.
Part throttle, part load fuel efficiency of a turbine is terrible .
Think of the air filters required for all that airflow?
Turbines are not suited for variable throttle work such as operating a loader.
 
AC tried one in a big dozer. The comments were something like-"loud/fast/thirsty". Then it blew up.
I've also seen pictures of a cab over Ford road tractor with a turbine. I think they may have had more than one, and used them in their own fleet, hauling parts, etc.
 
Late 50's Oliver was experimenting with Gas turbines. Saw one in Ford Museum in Dearborn on FFA trip there in 1958.

Gene
 
Neighbor Girl that I did not know later was one of the testers for that car. Too long ago to remember what the newspaper reports said about it.
 

The military uses a turbine in the Abram (sp) tank. Must work for them. They are still being used.
 
AC looked at them, railroads had a few turbines in the 50's, I have a video of them somewhere, were very loud and smokey.
 
(quoted from post at 07:34:23 01/15/15)
The military uses a turbine in the Abram (sp) tank. Must work for them. They are still being used.
Click to expand...

That's because the tax payer is buying the fuel! The M1A1 tank holds just over 500 gallons of fuel and has a range of 300 miles. The big thing that makes it great from the tank is light weight. Tanks are heavy because of the armor. When they first started development of the M1 their target weight was 40-45 tons. Then the Brits came up with new armor and the target weight went out the window. Crew survivability became very important. Plus add in the desired ground speeds they wanted to achieve. About the only option at the time was the turbine. A tractor needs weight to get better traction. The next problem is heat. Exhaust gas temps on the turbine engine are such that if you park a modern car right behind a tank, goose the throttle up to about 2500 RPMS it will melt the plastic and bubble the paint on the front of the car. So the exhaust would have to go up, not down and the air flow requires a large exhaust. A tractor in the 40 or so HP range would have an exhaust the size of a dinner plate. The size in the tank would be about the size of a 200 gallon fuel tank on a truck.

The other problem with a turbine in a vehicle is there is no engine braking at all. Take your foot off the gas and you have to use the brakes to slow down even just a couple of miles an hour.

Rick
 
Musta been in a John Deere 670, I've put a lot of hours in one of them, they aren't any fun to run when it's above 80 degrees with the motor beside you blowing hot air on you all day, the concept was kinda a joke compared to a 4wd tractor on a pull type scraper today. The 5020 engine don't have terrible power if you stay in 3rd gear but that's around 3mph and I believe it's a 9 or 10 yard scraper which is pretty big for that tractor.
 
(quoted from post at 10:18:19 01/15/15) AC tried one in a big dozer. The comments were something like-"loud/fast/thirsty". Then it blew up.
I've also seen pictures of a cab over Ford road tractor with a turbine. I think they may have had more than one, and used them in their own fleet, hauling parts, etc.
Click to expand...

We used to see Ford's highway tractors in Detroit. They had more than one, but not sure how many. They were way slow taking off from a traffic light. They moved down the highway good but got rotten millage. It was comparable with a V 12 Detroit in millage.
 
I thought I saw something years ago about AC making a turbine tractor. I did find this tractor that is built by IH and claims to be a turbine tractor.
IH HT-341
a179402.jpg
 
GMC made a few Astro with a turbine in them. The only problem they had was in the fall going through a town they would set trees on fire. The semi tractor had two large stacks and would through fire out the top of stacks.
 
you are 10 yrs to late ,, Chrysler gave up on turbines in mid 60s,they test drove across hiway 66 to los angelos ,,the motors would burn any liquid and get power fronm it ,..
 
(quoted from post at 14:51:59 01/15/15) you are 10 yrs to late ,, Chrysler gave up on turbines in mid 60s,they test drove across hiway 66 to los angelos ,,the motors would burn any liquid and get power fronm it ,..
Click to expand...


The M1 tank will burn diesel, kerosene, JP 4 and 6 or gas. It burns almost as much at idle as it does at WOT. Our first field exercise with the M1's the BN supply officer didn't take that into account. He thought that we would burn about the same amount of fuel as with the M60's. I don't know if he wasn't told or just forgot. 14 days into a 30 day exercise we ran out of fuel. The local Army airfield had a bunch of JP4 that was contaminated to the point it couldn't be used in aircraft but could be burned in the tanks. Was a win, win for the Army. instead of paying to have the fuel shipped out, filtered and returned or disposing it as hazardous waste we burn it in our tanks. The only down side was with JP or gas you can't use the smoke generator. It makes smoke by spraying raw fuel into the exhaust duct. Darn tank looks like a blow torch when you hit the smoke generator with JP in the fuel cells.

Rick
 
Aside from first cost, there's a couple other problems with gas turbine prime movers in tractors, earthmovers, etc:

1 - Fuel economy. Compared to a diesel, a gas turbine's economy is only marginal at 100% load. It quickly gets worse at lower loads - at idle it is abysmal.

The Union Pacific railroad operated a small fleet of gas turbine locomotives in the 1950's and 60's. They were only economical only under long distance, full load situations (the turbines were always dispatched with a 25,000 gallon fuel tender car to keep up with their thirst for fuel). In their later years they were paired with one or more conventional diesel locomotives so the turbines could be shut down under slow conditions, when stopped for meets, etc.

2 - Gas turbines are very sensitive to dust in the combustion air. And since they consume prodigious quantities of air, keeping combustion air clean requires massive filters and frequent filter changes.
 
UP also tried a turbine rail engine using finely ground coal as fuel in 1962. Gas/oil fired problems listed were magnified to the point that when scrapped in 1968 the unit only had about 10k miles on it, as opposed to the ~1M miles on the liquid fired units.
 
(quoted from post at 15:28:09 01/15/15) Aside from first cost, there's a couple other problems with gas turbine prime movers in tractors, earthmovers, etc:

1 - Fuel economy. Compared to a diesel, a gas turbine's economy is only marginal at 100% load. It quickly gets worse at lower loads - at idle it is abysmal.

The Union Pacific railroad operated a small fleet of gas turbine locomotives in the 1950's and 60's. They were only economical only under long distance, full load situations (the turbines were always dispatched with a 25,000 gallon fuel tender car to keep up with their thirst for fuel). In their later years they were paired with one or more conventional diesel locomotives so the turbines could be shut down under slow conditions, when stopped for meets, etc.

2 - Gas turbines are very sensitive to dust in the combustion air. And since they consume prodigious quantities of air, keeping combustion air clean requires massive filters and frequent filter changes.
Click to expand...

Good point on the air filters. The M1's air filters had about double the filter surface of the M60. The M60 series ran a 1970 cubic inch air cooled diesel. We had to replace the M1 filters 2-3 times as often as the M60 filters. The procedure was to blow them out then weigh them. If after cleaning they were over a certain weight we got new filters. On the M60's the filters were only replaced when after cleaning there was excessive smoke. I had the same M60A3 from 83 to 87 and never got new filters. Every M1 I had got a least one set of filters while I was signed for it and I never had the same tank for 4 years. We were not putting on any more miles/hours. Just filters on the turbine were more critical than on a piston engine.

Loved the power and extra speed of the M1's but I can see where the fuel consumption is hard to justify in a civilian application other than aircraft.

Rick
 
The turbine was the coming thing in the 60s, many things were predicted to use them.

They are used in natural gas transportation for large base loads, and the recips are used for the variable loads. They usually start at 10K HP and go up to 50K, the recips rarely go over 4K HP.
 
Now there's a real world application for that! Just paint the target with a laser on the go and WHAMO....nothing but fur and dirt, floating in the air!!!
 
They were making headway on them but congress decided nasa could do it better. They've still got the cars in storage unless fix-it-again Tony scrapped them.
 
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