There have been a vast number of designs of steam boiler, particularly towards the end of the 19th century when the technology was evolving rapidly. A great many of these took the names of their originators or primary manufacturers, rather than a more descriptive name. Some large manufacturers also made boilers of several types. Accordingly, it is difficult to identify their technical aspects from merely their name. This list presents these known, notable names and a brief description of their main characteristics.
annular fire-tube boiler: a vertical fire-tube boiler with the tubes arranged radially,[1] such as the Robertson.
annular water-tube boiler: a vertical water-tube boiler with the tubes arranged radially, such as the Straker with horizontal tubes, or near-vertically and conically[2] as used by Thornycroft for steam wagons.
auxiliary boiler: An auxiliary boiler, on a steam ship, supplies steam that is not used for main propulsion, but is necessary for some part of the essential machinery.[3] See also donkey boiler. A small boiler may be used as an auxiliary boiler when at sea, or a donkey boiler in port. A composite auxiliary boiler does this, using waste heat from the main engines when at sea, or is separately fired when acting as a donkey boiler. Auxiliary boilers were also present in some locomotives, in particular those used in passenger rail service, where steam was used as heating for the cars being pulled. With the advent of head end power, these steam boilers were phased out, often being replaced with concrete weights.
Thornycroft steam wagon boiler, an annular water-tube with inclined tubes
Babcock-Johnson boiler: early production Johnson boilers operating at high pressures (850 psi [59 bar; 5,900 kPa]) and with water-wall ends to their furnace.[4]
box boiler: An early marine boiler with flat sides. Owing to the flat sides, even with extensive rod stays, the boilers were only suitable for low pressures. These boilers were physically large and contained a few large flues, each heated by its own furnace. The flues were round, rectangular or arched and usually long and labyrinthine.[11]
Brotan boiler: a rarely used boiler for steam locomotives that combined a conventional fire-tube boiler barrel with a water-tube firebox. There is a prominent steam drum above the boiler barrel, making it resemble a Flaman boiler.[12][13]
Brotan-Deffner boiler: a variant of the Brotan boiler. The steam drum was shortened and placed behind the boiler barrel, giving a much more conventional silhouette. Around a thousand of these were used in Hungary.[12][13]
Clarkson thimble tube boiler[15]: the original thimble-tube boiler, using a great many short closed-ended watertubes. Often used for heat-recovery from the exhaust of large Diesel engines.[16]
Climax boiler: A vertical water-tube boiler with many long spiral coils around a central steam-and-water drum.[17]
Corner tube boiler: a natural circulation water tube boiler in which the pre-separation of steam takes place from the water-steam mixture outside the drum and the preheated downcomers.
Cornish boiler: a large horizontal stationary boiler with a single flue.
cross-tube boiler: usually a vertical flued boiler with a small number of large water-carrying cross-tubes within the firebox.
The term is also applied to vertical boilers with other arrangements of tubes, such as those with horizontal fire-tubes.
De Poray boiler: patented French designs with a secondary combustion chamber to improve combustion efficiency. A vertical form of this uses field-tubes.
donkey boiler: A donkey boiler is used to supply non-essential steam to a ship for 'hotel' services such as heating or lighting when the main boilers are not in steam, for example, when in port.[3] Donkey boilers were also used by the last sailing ships for working winches and anchor capstans. See also auxiliary boiler.
express boiler: another term for small-tube water-tube boilers, on account of their high ratio between heating surface area and water volume, and thus their rapid steam-raising.
Fairfield-Johnson boiler: a later form of Johnson boiler operating at lower pressure (450 psi [31 bar; 3,100 kPa] rather than 850 psi [59 bar; 5,900 kPa]), but still a high superheat temperature 825 °F (441 °C).[4]
Fairlie boiler: A double-ended locomotive boiler with a central firebox, used in Fairlie's patent for double-ended articulated steam locomotives.
fire-tube boiler: A boiler with many narrow fire-tubes inside a water drum. A development of the flued boiler, where the many smaller tubes give a much larger heating surface area for the overall boiler volume.
Flaman boiler: an attempt to squeeze the largest possible locomotive boiler into the loading gauge by splitting the boiler into two drums: a fire-tube boiler beneath and a steam drum above.[24]
flued boiler: A boiler with only one or two large diameter fire-tubes inside a water drum. These later developed into the fire-tube boiler.
forced-circulation boiler: boilers where circulation is forced by a pump, rather than relying on thermosyphon effect. These may use either forced-water-circulation (e.g. La Mont) or forced-steam-circulation (e.g. Löffler).[25]
Galloway boiler: a Lancashire boiler fitted with Galloway tubes. Originally these fused the Lancashire boiler's original two flues into a single kidney-shaped flue, with the tubes mounted in the joined section. Later boilers kept the cylindrical flues separate and placed the tubes within them.
gothic boiler: an early locomotive boiler, where the outer firebox was particularly large and served as the steam dome, often highly decorated with polished brass. These were popular for early railway locomotives, from 1830 to 1850.[26]
This is another form of boiler frequently described as a "haystack".
gunboat boiler: similar to the commonly known locomotive boiler, from steam locomotives. A horizontal boiler drum contains multiple fire-tubes and a separate furnace. However, the furnace in a gunboat boiler has no opening at the bottom of the furnace to allow dumping of ash; the furnace is completely water-cooled, similar to a Scotch boiler furnace. These boilers were used in early torpedo boats and gunboats, having low height for protection from enemy gunfire.
haystack boiler: Early balloon- or haystack-shaped, circular in plan with a domed top and often a flat base. See also Napier and gothic, quite different designs also described as "haystack" boilers.
heat-recovery boiler: a boiler without its own furnace, used to recover heat from some earlier process, such as a large marine Diesel engine or an industrial furnace.[19]
Johnson boiler: one of the first "modern" classes of high-pressure marine oil-fired water-tube boilers. They have a single steam drum above a single water drum. Their small-diameter water-tubes curve outwards on each side to form a cylindrical furnace. As there is no grate or ashpan beneath, firing must be by oil. Return circulation is by external downcomers. Early versions also used water-walls at each end of the furnace, later ones had plain firebrick walls.[4]
Kier: (sometimes Keeve or Kieve) an un-fired boiler, a pressure vessel heated by an external steam supply, used for bleaching in dyeworks and processing paper pulp. In use they were continuously rotated by an engine, steam being supplied through a rotating joint in the axle. They were usually spherical, sometimes cylindrical, and some were recycled from old boiler shells.[31]
Kingdom boiler: an uncommon pattern of water-tube boiler.[32]
locomotive boiler: the commonly known form familiar from steam locomotives. A horizontal boiler drum contains multiple fire-tubes and a separate firebox.
Monotube steam generator: A single tube, usually in a multi-layer spiral, that forms a once-through steam generator. The first of these was the Herreshoff steam generator of 1873.[38]
Multi-tube boiler: fire-tube boiler with multiple small fire-tubes, rather than a single large flue.
return-tube boiler: fire-tube boiler with multiple small fire-tubes that reverse the direction of gas flow within the boiler. Individual tubes are not folded: there is usually a furnace, a combustion chamber that reverses the flow, then the tubes return from that. The Scotch is a well-known example of this type.
Schmidt boiler: a high-pressure locomotive boiler, as used for the experimental LMS 6399 Fury. To avoid the usual problems of scale formation in a highly stressed firebox, the Schmidt system uses a separate primary circuit filled with distilled water.[49]
Smithies boiler: A development of the pot boiler with added watertubes, used for model steam locomotives.[52] The boiler was invented by F. Smithies in 1900 and developed by Greenly. It consists of a cylindrical water drum hidden inside a larger drum that forms the visible part of the model. Long slightly-sloping water-tubes are mounted beneath this water drum. The advantage of the boiler over similar model boilers is the use of almost the entire water drum surface for heating, although this also tends to scorch any paintwork on the outer drum, unless this is insulated.[53] In a later development by Greenly, the backhead of the boiler becomes a double-walled water space and straight water-tubes are led into this at an angle.
Steam generator: modern boilers, with very small volume in relation to their heating area. Boiling is thus almost instantaneous and the volume of heated, but unboiled, water is minimal.[56]
vertical boiler: flued or fire-tube designs where the main shell is a cylinder on a vertical axis, rather than horizontal. Boilers of this external form may have a great variety of internal arrangements.
wagon boiler: an early boiler, enlarged from the haystack to a flat-sided rectangular plan that permitted a larger grate area, but could only withstand low pressures.
Yorkshire steam wagon boiler: A double-ended transverse-mounted boiler used in steam wagons, to avoid problems of tilting when climbing hills. Internally it resembled a locomotive or Fairlie boiler with a central firebox and multiple fire-tubes to each end. In the Yorkshire though, a second bank of fire-tubes above returned to a central smokebox and a single chimney.
^Uri Zelbstein (1987). "L'histoire d'une invention: Julien Belleville et sa chaudière à tubes d'eau". History and Technology (in French). 3 (2): 205–218. doi:10.1080/07341518708581667.