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Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Steam Generation


In fossil-fueled power plants, steam generator refers to a furnace that burns the fossil fuel to boil water to generate steam. In the nuclear plant field, steam generator refers to a specific type of large heat exchanger used in a pressurized water reactor (PWR) to thermally connect the primary (reactor plant) and secondary (steam plant) systems, which of course is used to generate steam. In a nuclear reactor called a boiling water reactor (BWR), water in boiled to generate steam directly in the reactor itself and there are no units called steam generators. In some industrial settings, there can also be steam-producing heat exchangers called heat recovery steam generators (HRSG) which utilize heat from some industrial process. The steam generating boiler has to produce steam at the high purity, pressure and temperature required for the steam turbine that drives the electrical generator. A fossil fuel steam generator includes an economizer, a steam drum, and the furnace with its steam generating tubes and superheater coils. Necessary safety valves are located at suitable points to avoid excessive boiler pressure. The air and flue gas path equipment include: forced draft (FD) fan, air preheater (APH), boiler furnace, induced draft (ID) fan, fly ash collectors (electrostatic precipitator or baghouse) and the flue gas stack.[1][2][3]
Geothermal plants need no boiler since they use naturally occurring steam sources. Heat exchangers may be used where the geothermal steam is very corrosive or contains excessive suspended solids. Nuclear plants also boil water to raise steam, either directly generating steam from the reactor (BWR) or else using an intermediate heat exchanger (PWR).
For units over about 200 MW capacity, redundancy of key components is provided by installing duplicates of the FD fan, APH, fly ash collectors and ID fan with isolating dampers. On some units of about 60 MW, two boilers per unit may instead be provided.

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