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Funnel (ship)

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Twin funnels of PS Waverley
Twin funnels of PS Waverley
Diesel exhausts through the funnel of a modern cruise ship, MS Astor
Diesel exhausts through the funnel of a modern cruise ship, MS Astor

A funnel is the smokestack or chimney on a ship used to expel boiler steam and smoke or engine exhaust. They are also commonly referred to as stacks.

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Chimney

Chimney

A chimney is an architectural ventilation structure made of masonry, clay or metal that isolates hot toxic exhaust gases or smoke produced by a boiler, stove, furnace, incinerator, or fireplace from human living areas. Chimneys are typically vertical, or as near as possible to vertical, to ensure that the gases flow smoothly, drawing air into the combustion in what is known as the stack, or chimney effect. The space inside a chimney is called the flue. Chimneys are adjacent to large industrial refineries, fossil fuel combustion facilities or part of buildings, steam locomotives and ships.

Ship

Ship

A ship is a large watercraft that travels the world's oceans and other sufficiently deep waterways, carrying cargo or passengers, or in support of specialized missions, such as defense, research and fishing. Ships are generally distinguished from boats, based on size, shape, load capacity and purpose. Ships have supported exploration, trade, warfare, migration, colonization, and science. After the 15th century, new crops that had come from and to the Americas via the European seafarers significantly contributed to world population growth. Ship transport is responsible for the largest portion of world commerce.

Boiler

Boiler

A boiler is a closed vessel in which fluid is heated. The fluid does not necessarily boil. The heated or vaporized fluid exits the boiler for use in various processes or heating applications, including water heating, central heating, boiler-based power generation, cooking, and sanitation.

Steam

Steam

Steam is a substance containing water in the gas phase, and sometimes also an aerosol of liquid water droplets, or air. This may occur due to evaporation or due to boiling, where heat is applied until water reaches the enthalpy of vaporization. Steam that is saturated or superheated is invisible; however, wet steam or water vapor, a visible mist or aerosol of water droplets, is often referred to as "steam".

Smoke

Smoke

Smoke is a suspension of airborne particulates and gases emitted when a material undergoes combustion or pyrolysis, together with the quantity of air that is entrained or otherwise mixed into the mass. It is commonly an unwanted by-product of fires, but may also be used for pest control (fumigation), communication, defensive and offensive capabilities in the military, cooking, or smoking. It is used in rituals where incense, sage, or resin is burned to produce a smell for spiritual or magical purposes. It can also be a flavoring agent and preservative.

Engine

Engine

An engine or motor is a machine designed to convert one or more forms of energy into mechanical energy.

Exhaust gas

Exhaust gas

Exhaust gas or flue gas is emitted as a result of the combustion of fuels such as natural gas, gasoline (petrol), diesel fuel, fuel oil, biodiesel blends, or coal. According to the type of engine, it is discharged into the atmosphere through an exhaust pipe, flue gas stack, or propelling nozzle. It often disperses downwind in a pattern called an exhaust plume.

Purpose

While at anchor, a ship blows soot, dust and debris out of its funnels.
While at anchor, a ship blows soot, dust and debris out of its funnels.
SS France (1960) (as SS Norway) and her distinctive wings, to increase uplift on the funnel's exhaust
SS France (1960) (as SS Norway) and her distinctive wings, to increase uplift on the funnel's exhaust

The primary purpose of a ship's funnel(s) is to lift the exhaust gases clear of the deck, in order not to foul the ship's structure or decks, and to avoid impairing the ability of the crew to carry out their duties.

In steam ships the funnels also served to help induce a convection draught through the boilers.

Design

Since the introduction of steam-power to ships in the 19th century, the funnel has been a distinctive feature of the silhouette of a vessel, and used for recognition purposes.

Funnel area

The required funnel cross-sectional area is determined by the volume of exhaust gases produced by the propulsion plant. Often this area is too great for a single funnel. Early steam vessels needed multiple funnels (SS Great Eastern had 5 when launched), but as efficiency increased new machinery needed fewer funnels.

Merchant ships

Merchant shipping companies (and particularly liner companies such as Cunard Line and ferries such as Red Funnel) were quick to recognise the publicity value of distinctive funnels, both in terms of shape, number of funnels, and the colours they were painted. In an era when ship hulls were uniformly painted black (to conceal inevitable dirt when loading the ship with coal) and superstructures were white (to control the temperature in the passenger accommodation in hot summers) the funnel was one of the few parts of the ship that a company could use to clearly differentiate its ships from those of its competitors. Each company would have their own "house colours", which were often used in publicity material as well as for recognition, making funnel colours an early form of trademark.[1] Some companies became so closely associated with their funnel colours that their nickname became a de facto company name. For example, the shipping line actually registered as 'Alfred Holt & Company' was more widely known as the Blue Funnel Line. The Southampton, Isle of Wight and South of England Royal Mail Steam Packet Company has traded under the name Red Funnel for most of its 150+ year history. Other colours such as the red with black stripes of the Cunard Line and the all buff colour of P&O remain icons of their respective lines and have remained in use for over a century through many changes of corporate ownership.

Merchant shipping lines often painted their ships' funnels in distinctive colours to distinguish them from competitors. Here a selection of company house flags are shown with their associated funnel patterns (circa 1900).
Merchant shipping lines often painted their ships' funnels in distinctive colours to distinguish them from competitors. Here a selection of company house flags are shown with their associated funnel patterns (circa 1900).

Sometimes the shape of the funnel is used as distinguishing feature rather than just the colour. Cunard fitted ships of its Saxonia class with streamlined round tops to the funnels. Intended as an aerodynamic aid to keep exhaust clear of the deck the modification had very little practical effect but was retained because it made the four ships of the class immediately recognisable and gave Cunard a suitable modern image. There was a trend for 'designer funnels' on liners in the 1960s as fashion and aerodynamic advances combined to offer designers more options that the traditional cylindrical smokestack. The Italian Line fitted the liners Michelangelo and Raffaello with funnels topped by flat discs supported on exposed diagonal bracing while P&O's Oriana and Canberra had tall, thin funnels with aerofoil cross sections.

In the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century the number of funnels became associated with speed and reliability. For this reason a number of the great liners carried additional false funnels that they did not need. Examples included the White Star Line's RMS Titanic, Hamburg America Line's SS Imperator, and later the French Line's SS Normandie. In most cases there was only a single false funnel placed as the aftermost of the funnels. The false funnels did have more uses than simply aiding aesthetics however - a stoker who survived the sinking of the Titanic escaped the boiler room by ascending the false funnel, the aft funnel of Normandie housed the passengers' dog kennels, and Disney Cruise Line's Disney Magic's forward funnel plays host to a teens-only club.

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Cunard Line

Cunard Line

Cunard is a British shipping and cruise line based at Carnival House at Southampton, England, operated by Carnival UK and owned by Carnival Corporation & plc. Since 2011, Cunard and its three ships have been registered in Hamilton, Bermuda.

Red Funnel

Red Funnel

Red Funnel, the trading name of the Southampton Isle of Wight and South of England Royal Mail Steam Packet Company Limited, is a ferry company that carries passengers, vehicles and freight on routes between the English mainland and the Isle of Wight. High-speed foot passenger catamarans, known as Red Jets, run between Southampton and Cowes, while vehicle ferries run between Southampton and East Cowes.

De facto

De facto

De facto describes practices that exist in reality, whether or not they are officially recognized by laws or other formal norms. It is commonly used to refer to what happens in practice, in contrast with de jure, which refers to things that happen according to official law, regardless of whether the practice exists in reality.

Blue Funnel Line

Blue Funnel Line

Alfred Holt and Company, trading as Blue Funnel Line, was a UK shipping company that was founded in 1866 and operated merchant ships for 122 years. It was one of the UK's larger shipowning and operating companies, and as such had a significant role in the country's overseas trade and in the First and Second World Wars.

Buff (colour)

Buff (colour)

Buff is a light brownish yellow, ochreous colour, typical of buff leather. Buff is a mixture of yellow ochre and white: two parts of white lead and one part of yellow ochre produces a good buff, or white lead may be tinted with French ochre alone.

RMS Saxonia (1954)

RMS Saxonia (1954)

RMS Saxonia was a British passenger liner built by John Brown & Company at Clydebank, Scotland for the Cunard Steamship Company for their Liverpool-Montreal service. She was the first of four almost identical sister ships built by Browns between 1954 and 1957 for UK-Montreal service. The first two of these ships, Saxonia and Ivernia were extensively rebuilt in 1962/3 as dual purpose liner/cruise ships. They were renamed Carmania and Franconia respectively and painted in the same green cruising livery as the Caronia. Carmania continued transatlantic crossings and cruises until September 1967 when she closed out Cunard's Montreal service. She and her sister had been painted white at the end of 1966 and from 1968 Carmania sailed as a full time cruise ship until withdrawal after arriving at Southampton on 31 October 1971. In August 1973 she was bought by the Soviet Union-based Black Sea Shipping Company and renamed SS Leonid Sobinov. The ship was scrapped in 1999.

Italian Line

Italian Line

Italian Line and from 1992 Italia Line, whose official name was Italia di Navigazione S.p.A., was a passenger shipping line that operated regular transatlantic services between Italy and the United States, and Italy and South America. During the late 1960s the company turned to running cruises, and from 1981 it became a global freight operator.

SS Michelangelo

SS Michelangelo

SS Michelangelo was an Italian ocean liner built in 1965 for Italian Line by Ansaldo Shipyards, Genoa. She was one of the last ships to be built primarily for liner service across the North Atlantic. Her sister ship was the SS Raffaello.

SS Oriana (1959)

SS Oriana (1959)

SS Oriana was the last of the Orient Steam Navigation Company's ocean liners. She was built at Vickers-Armstrongs, Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, England and launched on 3 November 1959 by Princess Alexandra. Oriana first appeared as an Orient Line ship, with a corn-coloured hull, until 1966, when that company was fully absorbed into the P&O group. Faced with unprofitable around-the-world passenger routes, the P&O white hulled Oriana was operated as a full-time cruise ship from 1973. Between 1981 and her retirement from service five years later, Oriana was based at Sydney, Australia, operating to Pacific Ocean and South-East Asian ports. Deemed surplus to P&O's requirements in early 1986, the vessel was sold to become a floating hotel and tourist attraction, first in Japan and later in China. As a result of damage sustained from a severe storm whilst in the port of Dalian in 2004, SS Oriana was finally sold to local breakers in 2005.

SS Canberra

SS Canberra

SS Canberra was an ocean liner, which later operated on cruises, in the P&O fleet from 1961 to 1997. She was built at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Northern Ireland at a cost of £17 million. The ship was named on 17 March 1958, after the federal capital of Australia, Canberra. She was launched on 16 March 1960, sponsored by Dame Pattie Menzies, wife of the then Prime Minister of Australia, Robert Menzies. She entered service in May 1961, and made her maiden voyage starting in June. In the 1982 Falklands War she served as a troopship. In 1997 the singer and songwriter Gerard Kenny released the single "Farewell Canberra" which was specially composed for the last voyage.

Hamburg America Line

Hamburg America Line

The Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Aktien-Gesellschaft (HAPAG), known in English as the Hamburg America Line, was a transatlantic shipping enterprise established in Hamburg, in 1847. Among those involved in its development were prominent citizens such as Albert Ballin, Adolph Godeffroy, Ferdinand Laeisz, Carl Woermann, August Bolten, and others, and its main financial backers were Berenberg Bank and H. J. Merck & Co. It soon developed into the largest German, and at times the world's largest, shipping company, serving the market created by German immigration to the United States and later, immigration from Eastern Europe. On 1 September 1970, after 123 years of independent existence, HAPAG merged with the Bremen-based North German Lloyd to form Hapag-Lloyd AG.

SS Imperator

SS Imperator

SS Imperator was a German ocean liner built for the Hamburg America Line, launched in 1912. At the time of her completion in June 1913, she was the largest passenger ship in the world by gross tonnage, surpassing the new White Star liner Olympic.

Naval ships

HMS Campbeltown with her four funnels reduced to two with angled caps, in order to resemble a German Type 23 torpedo boat.
HMS Campbeltown with her four funnels reduced to two with angled caps, in order to resemble a German Type 23 torpedo boat.
The quintuple-funneled Russian cruiser Askold in 1901.
The quintuple-funneled Russian cruiser Askold in 1901.

A key part of the deception practiced by ships carrying out commerce raiding during both the First World War and Second World War was to disguise their ship's outline, and this included using false funnels or by changing the height or diameter of the actual funnel(s).[2]

The six-funneled armored cruiser Edgar Quinet
The six-funneled armored cruiser Edgar Quinet

Four naval ships with six funnels each were constructed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: two Italia-class ironclad battleships operated by the Italian Navy from 1885 to 1921, and two Edgar Quinet-class armored cruisers operated by the French Navy from 1911 to 1932. Both had their funnels in two groups of three before and abaft of center.

Macks

A mack is a combined stack and mast, as fitted to some classes of 20th century warships. Although they can reduce top-weight, they have not gained universal popularity due to the problem of exhaust gases corroding electrical aerials and equipment.

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HMS Campbeltown (I42)

HMS Campbeltown (I42)

HMS Campbeltown was a Town-class destroyer of the Royal Navy during the Second World War. She was originally US destroyer USS Buchanan, and was one of 50 obsolescent U.S. Navy destroyers transferred to the Royal Navy in 1940 as part of the Destroyers for Bases Agreement. Campbeltown became one of the most famous of these ships when she was used in the St Nazaire Raid in 1942.

Type 23 torpedo boat

Type 23 torpedo boat

The Type 23 torpedo boat was a group of six torpedo boats built for the Reichsmarine during the 1920s. As part of the renamed Kriegsmarine, the boats made multiple non-intervention patrols during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. During World War II, they played a minor role in the Norwegian Campaign of 1940, Albatros being lost when she ran aground. The Type 23s spent the next several months escorting minelayers as they laid minefields and escorting ships before the ships were transferred to France around September. Möwe was torpedoed during this time and did not return to service until 1942. They started laying minefields themselves in September and continued to do so for the rest of the war.

Russian cruiser Askold

Russian cruiser Askold

Askold was a protected cruiser built for the Imperial Russian Navy. She was named after the legendary Varangian Askold. Her thin, narrow hull and maximum speed of 23.8 knots (44.1 km/h) were considered impressive for the time.

Commerce raiding

Commerce raiding

Commerce raiding is a form of naval warfare used to destroy or disrupt logistics of the enemy on the open sea by attacking its merchant shipping, rather than engaging its combatants or enforcing a blockade against them.

Italia-class ironclad

Italia-class ironclad

The Italia class was a class of two ironclad battleships built for the Italian Regia Marina in the 1870s and 1880s. The two ships—Italia and Lepanto—were designed by Benedetto Brin, who chose to discard traditional belt armor entirely, relying on a combination of very high speed and extensive internal subdivision to protect the ships. This, along with their armament of very large 432 mm (17 in) guns, has led some naval historians to refer to the Italia class as prototypical battlecruisers.

Edgar Quinet-class cruiser

Edgar Quinet-class cruiser

The Edgar Quinet class was the last type of armored cruiser built for the French Navy. The two ships of this class—Edgar Quinet and Waldeck-Rousseau—were built between 1905 and 1911. They were based on the previous cruiser, Ernest Renan, the primary improvement being a more powerful uniform main battery of 194 mm (7.6 in) guns. The Edgar Quinet class was the most powerful type of armored cruiser built in France, but they entered service more than two years after the British battlecruiser HMS Invincible, which, with its all-big-gun armament, had rendered armored cruisers obsolescent.

Source: "Funnel (ship)", Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, (2022, October 29th), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnel_(ship).

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References
  1. ^ TheShipsList. "Funnels, Flags, and Night Signals of the Transatlantic Lines". Archived from the original on 29 August 2000. Retrieved 10 February 2011.
  2. ^ John Asmussen. "Admiral Graf Spee in Disguise". Retrieved 10 February 2011.

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