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Posted by HeatPro on October 30, 2009 at 17:07:18:
In Reply to: Sentence fragment posted by Benjamin Mayersohn on October 27, 2009 at 19:19:27:
: : Hello all. My classmates and I were given an assignment for our freshman engineering design class that involves increasing the energy efficiency of a boiler system in a community housing project.
The only way to increase the energy efficiency of a steam unit (being the most inefficient of systems due to having to produce steam at 212F or higher in every cycle with losses when the burner shuts off) is to increase the insulation on the pipes and keep the windows closed.
There are two main questions the community representative wants us to address:
: : (1) Residents on upper floors are getting too little heat. Apparently the steam is not traveling quickly enough (?), so it is losing too much energy. He wants to know if and how we can address this, since energy is being wasted. He had initially suggested using a turbocharger, but we realized that this cannot work with boiler systems, so we're a bit lost.
+++ Yes, quite lost. You need to start with the fact that a building as high as the tallest building in the world will succeed in having steam reach the top floor with but 1 pound of pressure.
then you'll have to make sure the air leaves the pipes and radiation so steam can get in.
Thus, the problem is more likely that the air vents on the radiation or the traps aren't working right.
: : (2) Can we integrate the boiler and the hot water storage tank into one unit that will heat an entire building and ? I've done research on combination boilers online, but those seem too small for our purposes.
+++ that would take some cleverness in making the steam boiler reach over 212F while the water doesn't get that hot - or if the water gets that hot it remains under pressure and is tempered with a tempering valve.
: : Neither my teammates nor I known anything about boiler systems. We are eager to work and are not trying to take any easy ways out, but we would feel better about the project if we had a bit of guidance. We just want a general idea as to how we can accomplish the above tasks. If you need specific info about the boiler to answer the above questions, ask and I'll post whatever I copied down. Thank you in advance.
The boiler and brand wouldn't help; but describing whether the system is one-pipe, two-pipe, atmospheric, air vented, trapped would give more of a starting point.
: : - Ben M.
: Sorry about the sentence fragment, I meant to say "one unit that will heat an entire building and lower utility costs in the long run". Thanks again.