Maurice Lemaître (Maurice Édouard Jean Joseph Ghislain Lemaître; born
Charleroi
Charleroi (, , ; ) is a city and a municipality of Wallonia, located in the province of Hainaut, Belgium. It is the largest city in both Hainaut and Wallonia. The city is situated in the valley of the Sambre, in the south-west of Belgium, not ...
, 6 July 1898; died
Etterbeek
Etterbeek (; ) is one of the List of municipalities of the Brussels-Capital Region, 19 municipalities of the Brussels-Capital Region, Belgium. Located in the eastern part of the region, it is bordered by the municipalities of Auderghem, the Cit ...
25 December 1974) was a
Belgian mechanical engineer who developed a
steam locomotive exhaust system
The steam locomotive exhaust system consists of those parts of a steam locomotive which together discharge exhaust steam from the cylinders in order to increase the draught through the fire. It usually consists of the blastpipe (or first stage ...
first used by the Nord-Belge railway company, a subsidiary of the French-owned
.
The
Lemaître exhaust (''échappement Lemaître'') – which featured a
blastpipe with five nozzles in a circular pattern exhausting up a large-diameter chimney, plus a variable-area nozzle exhausting up the centre – produced an efficiency gain of around 10%.
The design was later improved by the Argentine engineer
Livio Dante Porta
Livio Dante Porta (21 March 1922 – 10 June 2003) was an Argentine steam locomotive engineer. He is particularly remembered for his innovative modifications to existing locomotive systems in order to obtain better performance and energy effi ...
, who devised the
Lempor (a
portmanteau
In linguistics, a blend—also known as a blend word, lexical blend, or portmanteau—is a word formed by combining the meanings, and parts of the sounds, of two or more words together. of ''Lem''aître and ''Por''ta) and later the
Lemprex exhaust systems.
References
External links
The ultimate steam page – Steam Locomotive Exhaust Drawings
20th-century Belgian engineers
Belgian mechanical engineers
Belgian people in rail transport
Locomotive builders and designers
1974 deaths
1898 births
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