Interior View showing exhausters

Description Interior View showing exhausters

Date 14/8/1970

Collection Papers of Professor John R Hume, economic and industrial historian, Glasgow, Scotland

Catalogue Number SC 766081

Category On-line Digital Images

Scope and Content Girvan Gas Works, Gas Lane, Girvan, South Ayrshire This shows the interior of the exhauster house, with the two electrically-driven exhausters. The cast-iron drums contain rotors with sliding vanes. When these rotate they pump the newly-made gas from the retorts, speeding up the process of gasification. The hot gas then goes to the condenser. To prepare coal gas for customers the tar and ammonia in the raw gas were removed, and were saleable. This left hydrogen sulphide as the last unwanted impurity, which was removed in purifiers. Girvan Gas Works closed in the mid-1970s when the town was connected to the Gas Grid. This was one of the last coal-gas works in Ayrshire, and still used hand-charged retorts in 1970. It was relatively large because of the number of summer visitors, most of whom stayed in boarding houses. The retort house had an opening to the street, allowing the operation of the works to be viewed by small boys. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.

External Reference H35/70/48/34

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/collection/766081

File Format (TIF) Tagged Image File Format bitmap