Tutorial - Steam Basics

Q1
A 4 m × 5 m × 7 m room in the administration building of a dairy plant is heated by the radiator of a steam heating
system. The steam radiator transfers heat at a rate of 10,000 kJ/h and a 100 W fan is used to distribute the warm
air in the room. The heat losses from the room are estimated to be at a rate of about 5000 kJ/h.
a) If the initial temperature of the room air is 10°C, determine how long it will take for the air temperature to
rise to 20 °C.
b) If 3 bar steam is used, calculate the steam requirement for keeping the room at 20 °C (running load)
c) However, excess steam is required for maintaining the temperature steadily at 20 °C. The senior manager
noted the possible cause may be the presence of air. He asked a newly recruited process engineer to install
a thermocouple in addition to the currently available pressure gauge which indicated 3 bar. The temperature
reading was found as 124 °C.
(i) How can you verify the presence of air by the method suggested by the senior manager?
(ii) What is the percentage of steam in air?
(iii) Calculate the percentage of excess steam requirement.
(iv) How does the presence of air affect the performance of a heat exchanger?
(v) Under what conditions the same radiator can be used to achieve the required heat transfer when
air is present in steam?
(vi) What are the other effects of the presence of air in steam?
(vii) How does the air enter the steam distribution system?
(viii) What are the options available for minimizing the presence of air in steam?
d) Senior manager was so concerned about the percentage of air present in the steam. Since the same steam is
used at 3 bar pressure to make hot water for CIP system in the dairy plant and the required temperature of
75 C could not be achieved even by increasing the steam flow rate. The heating coil of the hot water tank
is currently running under full load capacity and the running load for using saturated steam at 3 bar to
maintain the hot water temperature at 75 C is 20 kW.
(i) What are the possible causes for not able to achieve the required hot water temperature of 75 C?
(ii) One option is to increase the heat transfer area. Calculate the additional area requirement in the
heat exchanger to have the same heat transfer rate.
(iii) Alternatively, without modifying the heating coil, same heat transfer can be achieved by increasing
the steam pressure. The steam pressure was increased until the hot water temperature could be
maintained at 75 C. Determine the new readings of the pressure gauge and the thermocouple
attached to the heating coil. Also calculate the percentage of excess steam flow compared to the
original design.
(iv) Compare and contrast the 2 options in (ii) and (iii)

Assumptions
1. Specific heat of air is constant at Cp = 1.007 kJ/kg.K and R = 0.287 KJ/kg.K
2. Pressure in the room remains constant and negligible amount of air leaks out during expansion.
3. Steam enters the radiator as saturated vapor and leaves as saturated liquid.
Q2

The overall heat transfer coefficient for unfinned shell-and-tube is given by

1 1 1 𝑅𝑓,𝑖 𝑙𝑛(𝐷𝑜 ⁄𝐷𝑖 ) 𝑅𝑓,𝑜 1
= =𝑅= = + + +
𝑈𝑖 𝐴𝑖 𝑈𝑜 𝐴𝑜 ℎ𝑖 𝐴𝑖 𝐴𝑖 2𝜋𝑘𝐿 𝐴𝑜 ℎ𝑜 𝐴𝑜

Will complete this and upload again.