Coal Bunker design

[TimTurner]

I'm building a computer model of titanic and I'm trying to understand the layout of the upper boiler rooms and coal bunkers. I'm working off of the Bruce Beveridge schematic and some of the geometry is less clear here.

1. Above the boiler rooms, the room narrows, like a big square donut with the smoke risers coming up through the middle. The area around that seems to be part of the coal bunker - sort of. But how is the weight of that coal supported? How do the trimmers move the coal out of that big flat area down to the vertical sections where it can fall down to deckplate level? Is this really part of the coal bunker?

2. What's on the sides of the donuts - the part that isn't over the vertical coal bunker? There are these large flat planes port and starboard hanging over the boiler room. There's no obvious way for coal here to fall into the verticals.

3. The Bruce Beveridge schematic has these large rectangles in parts of the "donut" floor. I've been interpreting them as holes for the coal to fall through into the verticals of the coal bunkers, but there are smaller holes elsewhere with clear support beams. These holes seem oddly placed to let a substantial amount of coal fall from above, especially in the flat places near the hull towards the center of the boiler rooms. I've highlighted one of the "hole" rectangles below with the arrow.

Color Code:
Black = hull (above anti-fouling paint)
Red = Hull (Anti-fouling paint - below waterline)
Gray = Deck and interior bulkhead
Dark Gray = Boilers, Smoke risers
Tan = Steam piping
Yellow = Funnel

 

[Stephen Carey]

As far as I know - and I can't find a ship's section that i thought I had in way of the bunkers, that's the coaling gallery

I'm building a computer model of titanic and I'm trying to understand the layout of the upper boiler rooms and coal bunkers. I'm working off of the Bruce Beveridge schematic and some of the geometry is less clear here.

1. Above the boiler rooms, the room narrows, like a big square donut with the smoke risers coming up through the middle. The area around that seems to be part of the coal bunker - sort of. But how is the weight of that coal supported? How do the trimmers move the coal out of that big flat area down to the vertical sections where it can fall down to deckplate level? Is this really part of the coal bunker?

View attachment 48578

2. What's on the sides of the donuts - the part that isn't over the vertical coal bunker? There are these large flat planes port and starboard hanging over the boiler room. There's no obvious way for coal here to fall into the verticals.
View attachment 48576

3. The Bruce Beveridge schematic has these large rectangles in parts of the "donut" floor. I've been interpreting them as holes for the coal to fall through into the verticals of the coal bunkers, but there are smaller holes elsewhere with clear support beams. These holes seem oddly placed to let a substantial amount of coal fall from above, especially in the flat places near the hull towards the center of the boiler rooms. I've highlighted one of the "hole" rectangles below with the arrow.
View attachment 48579
Color Code:
Black = hull (above anti-fouling paint)
Red = Hull (Anti-fouling paint - below waterline)
Gray = Deck and interior bulkhead
Dark Gray = Boilers, Smoke risers
Tan = Steam piping
Yellow = Funnel

As far as I know, those are the coaling galleries above the bunkers. When the coal comes in through the coaling ports, it's emptied on to the gallery where the trimmers and firemen shovel it over the top into the bunkers. I would imagine that the bunkers had a coarse grating over the top to stop a man falling in, though it would be very coarse to allow the larger lumps of coal to fall through. The gallery would have gone round the top of the whole bunker, and when the latter were full, the coal would pile up in the galleries if that much was required for the voyage. I would imagine that for P&O going out east that this would be the case in any coaling port where the coal was cheaper (the same happens on oil fired ships toady where the company wants to take advantage of cheaper fuel).
I'm not absolutely sure of this but, as a marine systems designer, if I had to devise a method of coaling a ship, that's what I'd do! For ships with longitudinal coal bunkers (eg Mauretania) the coaling would not be transverse per Olympic class, so the ports on both sides would have been used and the coal shovelled down into the bunkers through several grated openings so that the fuel could be reasonably levelled. Again, don't know, but it's what I'd do.
On both types, once oil firing came in, the galleries effectively became the top of the oil bunker tanks with the openings plated over and made oil tight, with the usual additions required for oil burning such as bolted manhole doors, sounding pipes, air vents etc.
I thought I'd seen some explanation from someone like Sam Halpern or Mark Chirnside on these coaling galleries, so you could ask those worthy gentlemen personally?

 

[TimTurner]

Thank you. I've been doing some digging to find all this out. For some reason, the inner workings of the coal storage bins don't seem to be glamorized as much as other parts of the ship.

One of the bigger mysteries left to me are the big rectangles in the 3rd picture. They don't seem to line up well with the steam piping access ways below or the apparent shape (from overhead and profile) of the bulkhead, so its questionable if they're holes in the deck. There are also other points clearly marked as holes.

 

[Steven Christian]

Thank you. I've been doing some digging to find all this out. For some reason, the inner workings of the coal storage bins don't seem to be glamorized as much as other parts of the ship.

One of the bigger mysteries left to me are the big rectangles in the 3rd picture. They don't seem to line up well with the steam piping access ways below or the apparent shape (from overhead and profile) of the bulkhead, so its questionable if they're holes in the deck. There are also other points clearly marked as holes.

Not to be a smart a** but from someone who worked with coal for 30 years I can't come up with a way that would make it glamorous...

 

[TimTurner]

Mysterious vault buried in the heart of Titanic filled with diamond inferno. Despite machinations of British labor cartel, hundreds of tons of fist-sized proto-diamonds smuggled onto Ttianic, carried beneath passengers' feet. Destroyed in a battery of specially engineered high temperature furnaces before the sinking, thousands of them may have survived, now waiting somewhere on the ocean floor.

 

[Steven Christian]

LOL. I'm guessing you might have read a few Clive Cussler novels.

 

[TimTurner]

Just good at embellishing resumes.

 

[Jett Barrett Pendergrass]

I'm building a computer model of titanic and I'm trying to understand the layout of the upper boiler rooms and coal bunkers. I'm working off of the Bruce Beveridge schematic and some of the geometry is less clear here.

1. Above the boiler rooms, the room narrows, like a big square donut with the smoke risers coming up through the middle. The area around that seems to be part of the coal bunker - sort of. But how is the weight of that coal supported? How do the trimmers move the coal out of that big flat area down to the vertical sections where it can fall down to deckplate level? Is this really part of the coal bunker?

View attachment 48578

2. What's on the sides of the donuts - the part that isn't over the vertical coal bunker? There are these large flat planes port and starboard hanging over the boiler room. There's no obvious way for coal here to fall into the verticals.
View attachment 48576

3. The Bruce Beveridge schematic has these large rectangles in parts of the "donut" floor. I've been interpreting them as holes for the coal to fall through into the verticals of the coal bunkers, but there are smaller holes elsewhere with clear support beams. These holes seem oddly placed to let a substantial amount of coal fall from above, especially in the flat places near the hull towards the center of the boiler rooms. I've highlighted one of the "hole" rectangles below with the arrow.
View attachment 48579
Color Code:
Black = hull (above anti-fouling paint)
Red = Hull (Anti-fouling paint - below waterline)
Gray = Deck and interior bulkhead
Dark Gray = Boilers, Smoke risers
Tan = Steam piping
Yellow = Funnel

is this in stormworks?

 

[TimTurner]

is this in stormworks?

Im sorry, no. It's in my own voxel engine (like Minecraft). I've had some business to attend to which has delayed this project, but I hope I can return to it later this year.

 

[Vincent Brannigan]

I am working on the coal fire issue So the question of bunker design is critical

It is clear that TITANIC had what you could call Firing Bunkers C,E,H,J,M,O,R,T,W,Y,b EACH HAD A CAPACITY OF 307-543 tons of coal
Those are clearly steel "boxes: fed form the top and emptied from the bottom

then there are two groups of mystery bunkers

transverse "bunkers" B D,G,I,L,N,Q,S,V,X,a Each one is "on top of" a firing bunker TRANSVERSE BUNKER CAPACITY JUST OVER 100 TONS
Then there are the port and starboard paired wing bunkers A,F,K,P,U,Z

Starboard U is only 20 tons because of the swimming pool z is large because of the smaller boiler uptake 143 tons each
all the rest are 5-64 tons

clearly coal stored here had to be moved into firing bunkers by trimmers through some kind of hole or hatch

The question is whether these bunkers actually existed or were they just names for spaces for piles of coal on the coal handling platform
Assuming for the moment that moving coal through the Watertight bulkhead was tedious here is the coal storage for each boiler room
#1 728
#2 1314
#3 1180
#4 1130
#5 1128
#6 1131