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Thumbnail for Example Problem - Rankine Cycle (4) - Closed Feedwater Heater (1)

Example Problem - Rankine Cycle (4) - Closed Feedwater Heater (1)

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The video presents an analysis of an ideal regenerative Rankine cycle incorporating a closed feedwater heater, using water as the working fluid with specific operating pressures and temperatures at the turbine inlet and condenser. The primary objective is to determine the mass flow proportion exiting the turbine early to supply the heater, calculate specific work and heat transfer values, and evaluate the overall thermal efficiency. A key distinction made in the analysis is that a closed feedwater heater introduces additional complexity compared to an open one; it requires separate pumping stages to reach high pressure before mixing or uses a trap to drop pressure, resulting in nine distinct state points instead of the usual seven because the device functions primarily as a mixing chamber rather than a heat exchanger where streams remain separate. To solve for the unknown properties at these nine states, the presenter establishes that pumps and turbines operate isentropically due to the lack of efficiency data, while condensers and heaters are assumed to be adiabatic with negligible kinetic and potential energy changes. The analysis relies heavily on identifying two independent intensive properties for each state: pressure is determined by tracing the isobaric processes through the condenser, closed heater, mixing chamber, and boiler, while temperature or quality assumptions define the remaining states. Specifically, the outlet of the closed feedwater heater is assumed to reach thermal equilibrium with the inlet stream, meaning the exit temperatures of both the hot and cold streams are identical, which provides the necessary condition to solve for the unknown enthalpies using energy balances on the mixing chamber and the closed heater itself. Once all enthalpy values are determined through property lookups and algebraic manipulation of the energy balance equations, the specific work inputs for the pumps, heat addition in the boiler, work output from the turbine, and heat rejection in the condenser are calculated. The resulting thermal efficiency is found to be approximately 30.8%, which is slightly lower than that of a cycle with an open feedwater heater. Despite this reduction in efficiency, the video explains that closed feedwater heaters are still utilized because they allow the entire regenerative cycle to be completed with fewer pumps, offering potential cost savings on equipment that may offset the slight loss in thermal performance and the increased mechanical complexity. The analysis concludes by visualizing the cycle on a T-s diagram and comparing manual calculations with MATLAB simulations, which provide accurate, to-scale diagrams and allow for parametric studies. By varying the regenerator pressure in the simulation, it is demonstrated that there is an optimal pressure—around 80 to 90 psi—that maximizes thermal efficiency, rather than simply using the lowest possible extraction pressure. Furthermore, the relationship between the mass flow fraction extracted from the turbine and the regenerator pressure is illustrated, showing how changing the extraction pressure alters the cycle's performance characteristics, ultimately providing a comprehensive understanding of optimizing regenerative Rankine cycles for maximum efficiency.
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an ideal regenerative rankine cycle with an open feed water heater uses water as the working fluid the turbine inlet is operated at 500 psi and 600 degrees fahrenheit and the condenser is operated at 5 psi steam is supplied to the feed water heater at 40 psi before being pumped and mixed with the feed water determine and complete the following first why the proportion of mass flow rate through the turbine that exits early to serve the closed feed water heater then the specific work in that's relative to the cycle itself then lastly the thermal efficiency like our previous example i'm going to try to identify two independent intensive properties about all nine of our state points the presence of the closed feed water heater means that i either have to pump my fluid back up to the high pressure before mixing or use a trap or expansion valve to drop it back down to the low pressure before mixing in either case i'm going to have additional steps in the process i have to have a separate place for the water to join back together and that is essentially an open feed water heater in and of itself it's just that the purpose isn't to actually accomplish any sort of heat transfer the goal is just to allow the streams to mix together so i have additional devices that's why i have nine state points instead of seven first i recognize that i still have three pressures and let's think through those together which stay points have the low pressure that's right eight because it's the outlet of the turbine once it has expanded all the way and one because the condenser operates isobarically and then the high pressure would be five and six but the high pressure also includes four nine and two does that make sense because the mixing chamber has to occur isobarically and the heat exchange process within the closed feed water heater also has to be isobaric so that means the separate streams in the closed feed water heater that's seven to three and two to nine are both going to be isobaric so two is equal to nine which is equal to four which is equal to five therefore the high pressure includes six and five and four and nine and two that leaves us with seven and 3 at the medium pressure so pump 1 is pumping from the low pressure all the way up to the high pressure 2 is just going from medium to high so nine four five two and six are high two four five six nine then 8 and 1 are low that leaves us with 7 and 3 as the medium pressure those pressures give me one half of my independent intensive properties required to get to all the rest of the lookups next i will consider the operation of the pumps and turbine because i was given no indication as to the operating efficiency of the turbine or the pumps i will assume that they are occurring isentropically meaning that they're 100 efficient so s2 is going to equal s1 s4 is going to equal s3 and s6 is equal to s7 and s8 that leaves me with four state points unaccounted for one of those is fulfilled by the temperature i was given at the inlet to the turbine that would be state 0.6 so i will say t6 is 600 degrees fahrenheit leaving me with three unaccounted for the next one is easy the condenser is assumed to only condense so i assume that the outlet of the condenser is a saturated liquid therefore i'm assuming x1 is zero and similarly i can assume that the closed feed water heater is allowing the stream at seven to condense and that's where it's getting its energy to push into the stream from two to nine so the condensation of the steam is actually what's accomplishing the heating process and i'm assuming that once it condenses it leaves because there's not enough temperature difference to really do a whole lot so t3 oh so x3 is also assumed to be zero and again i will indicate that that's an assumption that i'm making with an asterisk so i have five and nine unaccounted for five will come from an energy balance on the mixing chamber once i know everything about four and nine knowing five is just a matter of combining the two if i set up an energy balance on the mixing chamber i recognize that it's assumed to be adiabatic and there's no opportunities for work to occur and if i neglect any changes in kinetic and potential energy i will end up with the sum in of m.h is equal to the sum out of m.h meaning m.9 h9 plus m f4 h4 is equal to m.5 h5 if i know the proportion of mass flow rates at 9 and 4 i can calculate h5 so i will just write h5 comes from energy balance on mixing chamber and that leaves me with state nine so the key to state nine is similar to the assumption that we made about the operation of the regenerator back in the brayton cycle if we didn't have enough information to deduce otherwise we assume that regenerator operated with 100 effectiveness meaning as much heat as could be transferred was transferred and back in that analysis we had a heat exchanger where the flows were flowing in opposite directions so a high temperature here was driven to a lower temperature here at a high temperature here was driven to a lower temperature here and if i were to plot out the position let's call this hot in hot out iho cold in cold out co seco and then i am plotting temperatures relative to x position and if i had the worst heat exchanger in the world hot input would be here bold input would be here and absolutely nothing would happen in between the two so the temperature of c out would be the same as c in and the temperature of hot out would be the same as the temperature of hot in and if they were working just a little bit then the change in enthalpy which for air is directly correlated to a change in temperature is the same in both the hot stream and the cold stream meaning that i end up with lines that move up and down by the same amount and if i were to extrapolate this to ideal circumstances i end up with a line directly connecting the two so for a heat exchanger with flows in opposite directions like this one ideal operation is marked by the temperature of the cold outlet being the same as the temperature of the hot inlet and the temperature of the cold inlet being the same as the temperature of the hot outlet but our situation is different in our situation we have flows that are going more towards each other so if i draw this as a box i have the cold stream entering and then undergoing a whole bunch of surface area before leaving again let's stick with our naming convention here that was c in and see out and then hot in is steam so we are spraying that all over these coils it is allowed to condense and then leave so if we're assuming that as much heat as can be transferred is transferred then heat transfer will continue until the temperatures are the same but here i'm not referring to the temperature of the inlet of one stream and the outlet of the other no i'm referring to the temperature of the two outlet streams so in conclusion ideal operation of a closed feed water heater like this one is marked by the temperature of the outlet streams being the same so the assumption i make about state point nine is that it is the same as t3 and with that i have two independent intensive properties which theoretically would define all nine state points and looking up all my properties is just a matter of putting in the time so in an effort to continue our analysis of the problem before we get bogged up in the property lookups let's assume that we had done that okay poof we have all nine enthalpies or rather we have eight of them what do we do with those enthalpies well i want us to determine the specific work in the specific queue in the specific workout and the specific queue out starting with work in why don't you try that on your own first what do you get for an equation for the specific work into the cycle did you get 1 minus y times h2 minus h1 plus y times h4 minus h3 excellent here we are defining 7 or rather the mass flow rate that leaves as seven relative to six as y and whatever remains one minus y so the proportion of the mass flow rate that leaves early eminence seven over m.6 is defined as y and whatever's left over is one minus y so if 25 percent of the stream at 6 leaves at 7 the remaining 75 percent must leave at 8. then i recognize that the mass flow rate at 6 is the same as 5 and those two state points are what i'm calling m dot cycle the overall mass flow rate through my cycle and that stream is split some of it goes into 8 1 2 and 9. and some of it goes into seven three and four so in my workout equation excuse me in my work in equation i'm taking the total power input and dividing by m net cycle the total power input is going to be the power input to both pumps so the power input to pump 1 plus the power input to pump 2 and the power input to pump 1 is going to simplify down to the power input is equal to the mass flow rate through pump 1 which is either m.1 or m.2 times the quantity h2 minus h1 therefore i can write the power of pump 1 as m.1 times the quantity h2 minus h1 and then for pump 2 the power of pump 2 could be written as m dot 3 or 4 times the quantity h4 minus h3 therefore w dot in is equal to m.1 times h2 minus h1 plus lambda 3 times h4 minus h3 and then i'm dividing that entire quantity by m dot cycle and because m.1 divided by m.cycle is the same as m.8 divided by m.6 that means i'm writing it as 1 minus y and then because m.3 divided by m dot cycle is the same as m.7 divided by m.6 i'm writing that as y so my equation should be 1 minus y times the quantity h2 minus h1 plus y times the quantity h4 minus h3 then qn occurs in the boiler and the boiler has the mass flow rate of the cycle so q dot in divided by m dot cycle is going to simplify to m.5 times h6 minus h5 divided by m.cycle which is just 1 times the quantity h6 minus h5 which i can write as h6 minus h5 and then for our workout if we set up an energy balance in the turbine we're going to end up with the sum in of m.h is equal to the power output plus the sum out of m.h therefore m.6 h6 is equal to w dot out plus m.7 h7 plus m.8 h8 and when i divide that entire quantity by mdat cycle i'm left with h6 is equal to the specific workout plus y times h7 plus one minus y times h8 when i rearrange that equation to write specific workout i should get the entrance h6 minus y times the first outlet minus one minus y times the second outlet and then for q out i'm only analyzing the condenser because remember the mixing chamber in the closed feed water heater are assumed to be well insulated therefore q dot out would be m.8 times the quantity h8 minus h1 dividing that quantity by mdhat's cycle with yield m dot h over m dot cycle times h8 minus h1 which simplifies down to one minus y times h8 minus h1 so once again i'm left with a relationship that is only a function of our enthalpies and y so in order to be able to finish the problem i have to determine why and to do that i'm going to need to perform an energy balance on a device about which i know everything because i don't know the workout that rules out the turbine because i don't know cue out i don't i can't analyze the condenser because i don't know the work in i can't analyze either of the pumps because i don't know q and i can't analyze the boiler that leaves me with the mixing chamber and the closed feed water heater but remember at this point in the analysis we haven't yet figured out h5 we can do everything else but we can't do h5 therefore the only device about which i know everything is going to be the closed feed water heater itself so an energy balance on the closed feed water heater will yield y and then i can use an energy balance in the mixing chamber to determine h5 and then i can determine the specific work in the specific queue in the specific workout the specific queue out then i can determine the thermal efficiency at which point i'm done with the question so energy balance on our closed feed water heater and for that i will draw a big vertical line so that ended up being an awfully busy drawing but the point is we have a cool stream at two to nine that is being heated up by the condensation of steam which comes in at seven and the result of that condensation leaves at state eight if i set up an energy balance on this control volume i have steady state operation of an open system so i'm going to skip the first couple of steps and write e dot in is equal to e dot out and then because it is an open system the energy could cross the boundary as heat transfer or work and because it is assumed to be adiabatic i can neglect the heat transfers i have no opportunity for work to occur so i neglect the works and remember that theta contains enthalpy specific kinetic energy and specific potential energy and i'm neglecting changes in kinetic and potential energy therefore i'm left with the sum in of m dot h is equal to the sum out of m dot h and then i have entering mass flow rates in the form of states two and seven so i can write that as m dot two times h2 plus m.7 times h7 and then i have exiting mass flow rates in the form of the other two states nine and eight is that eight no it's three and that's confusing let's correct that diagram i just drew okay 2 comes in 7 comes in 9 goes out 3 goes out we got it okay then our sum out would be m.9 h9 plus m.3 h3 and you're expecting me to now divide by mdat cycle and you're right that would work but before i do that i can make my life a little bit easier by recognizing that m.2 and m.9 are the same and m.7 and m.3 are the same so if i bring them together say by taking m.7 times h7 minus h3 is equal to m dot two times h9 minus h2 now i have two fewer mass flow rates to have to deal with so i'm not 7 times h7 minus h3 is equal to m.2 times h9 minus h2 so i'm saying the energy absorbed by the cool stream is equal to the energy exiting the warm stream multiplied by mass to get rates cool that all makes sense now i'm going to divide everything by m.cycle and then i'll have seven divided by m dot cycle which is the same as m.7 divided by m dash six so that simplifies to because i want to know for that joke to work you had to say it alone i just operated under the assumption that you are all participating audibly in those rhetorical questions that i ask you and then m.2 divided by m cycle is equal to m.8 divided by m dot six which is one minus y and then you know it's time for algebra to solve for y so i'm going to foil the right hand side first i don't really know why i'm narrating you guys can probably figure out what i'm doing but here i am minus first outside minus h2 inside minus y times h9 last plus h2 times y that's equal to y times h7 minus y times h3 now i want to get all the y's together so i'm going to say y times the quantity h7 minus h3 plus h9 minus h2 y times the quantity h7 minus h3 plus h9 minus h2 i don't know why i'm still narrating my algebra if i hadn't spoken i could have time lapsed this but you know what it's fun to do algebra together then solving for y yields h9 minus h2 divided by the quantity h7 minus h3 plus h9 minus h2 and nine minus two whole stream divided by seven minus three plus nine minus 2. yep i'm cool with it so at this point in our analysis if we had looked up all of the enthalpies except for state 5 i would have enough information to calculate y and then armed with our new y i could calculate h5 by performing an energy balance on the mixing chamber i think i can fit that in here i have entering mass at state let's double check this time as opposed to resorting to memory nine and four nine and four and it's leaving at five and the mixing chamber itself is adiabatic and has no opportunity for work so if i were to set up the worst control volume ever perform an energy balance on that control volume because it's steady and it's open and i'm neglecting changes in kinetic and potential energy and there are no opportunities for heat transfer or work i'm going to do one two skip a few all the way down to the sum in of m.h is equal to the sum out of m dot h i have one exiting mass two entering masses so m.9 h9 plus lambda 4 h4 is equal to m.5 h5 therefore i'm going to get rid of this page count therefore h5 is equal to that's not what i wanted red for some reason h5 is equal to m.4 h4 divided by a m.5 plus it looks a little bit too much like a nine so i'm gonna correct that that's a much better four while we're at it yeah good force that is a good for absolutely nothing say it again and h5 okay and if you expected me to have divided by m cycle i mean what i did was solve for h5 by dividing both sides by m.5 which is also equal to m dot cycle so it's essentially the same thing anyway which is fun so to four divided by m f5 is equal to m dot seven divided by m.6 which is y this is y times h4 and then num.9 is equal to m.8 and then m.9 divided by m.5 would be equal to m.8 divided by n red cycle which is one minus y and that gives me everything i need to calculate h5 so let's recap our outline for the moment we are going to look up h1 h2 h3h4h6h7h8h9 and then we're going to use our energy balance on our closed feed water heater to determine y and then we are going to use our energy balance in the mixing chamber to determine our h5 and then once we have y and all nine h's we are going to calculate the specific work in the specific q in the specific workout and the specific queue out and again because this is a thermo 2 example problem and i'm assuming that you guys are good at property table lookups i'm not going to waste any more example problem time looking up the properties on camera instead we are just going to jump to having all of the enthalpies except for state five are you ready here we go three two one and with that we have eight of our nine enthalpies again i included my work in full detail here on the attach pages so if you download the pdf below this video you can follow along with the lookups if you want to try them on your own and i would encourage you that you do and then our next step is going to be to calculate y from knowing h9h2 h7 and h3 so i'm going to take 9-2 which is going to require our calculator friend 9 minus 2 237.35 minus 133.27 and then we are dividing that quantity by another quantity seven minus three that's one zero five no one zero eight five point zero two minus three was two three six point one six and then plus 9 minus 2 plus 237.35 minus 133.27 that gives us a y value of 0.10922 and armed with our new y we now have everything we need to calculate h5 with the exception of a little bit more space so i'm going to take that y value times h4 oh no i moved the white that i had used to block out the page number that's interesting anyway so y times h4 which was 239.2 and i'm adding to that one minus y it's not minus calculator come on you're better than this times h5 which was wait times h5 what what what four and nine what am i doing i remember i was making a joke about the song war sounding like the song four so multiplying by h9 not h5 and that h9 value was 237.35 and that would be 237.552 it's useful at this point to sanity check that number we are mixing together the streams at four and nine so our state five should be somewhere between states four state fours enthalpy and state nines and there'll be so it should be somewhere between 239.2 and 237.35 since our y value is so small i should expect a number that is so much closer to h9 than it is to h4 because i'm taking a bigger quantity times h9 plus a smaller quantity times h4 that's why our value of 237.552 being so close to 237.35 compared to 239.2 is such a good sign and now i have all nine of my enthalpies so i have everything i need to be able to continue i will calculate the work in the q in the workout and the queue out which i will do first by scooching some stuff around what did i do how did i break okay let's try that again which i will do by scooching some stuff around hopefully correctly this time and that is probably enough space to finish the problem so 1 minus y times h2 minus h1 so 1 minus y times h2 minus h1 133.27 minus 130.17 plus y times h4 minus h3 h4 minus h3 was 239.2 minus 236.16 and i get a work in of approximately three next is q in which is easy that's just six minus five so i take 1298.3 minus 237.5 and i get 1060.75 just occurs to me now how many decimal points i used on work in but you know what we're gonna do it already so let's just continue then i'm taking one two nine eight point three minus y times h7 and h7 was 1085.02 minus 1 minus y times h8 which is 954.18 giving me 329.83 then after such complicated calculations such as work in and work out q out should be a breeze i'm taking 1 minus y times h8 minus h1 so 954.18 minus 130.17 which gives me 734.012 and with those quantities i have enough to calculate the net workout the net heat transfer in and then the thermal efficiency first up i have a workout minus work in which is 329.83 minus 3.09345 according to my work that is 326.736 and then i take 1060 and i divide by 734 and i get 326.736 as well again those values being the same implies that i built my equations for work in queue and work out and queue out correctly which is a little bit more reassuring as they get more complicated and then 326.736 that leaves us with thermal efficiency which is 326.736 divided by q in which was 1000 and change and i get 30.8 percent so if i were to pose the question how does this efficiency compare to the previous problems efficiency well it seems like they're pretty close to the same right 30.83 compared to 30.80 but our thermal efficiency in the closed feed water heater is reflective of the differences between the two types of regenerative rankine cycles closed feed water heaters are always going to be less efficient than open feed water heaters that might cause you to ask yourself why then would anyone ever use a closed feed water heater they're they're more mechanically complicated they're less effective why would i want one well when we are talking about different ways of implementing a regenerative rankine cycle the advantage of the closed feed water heater is that you can accomplish the overall cycle with fewer pumps so if i were to expand the stream from seven to three back down to the low pressure and mix it together with the stream at one minus y and have them compressed in a single pump i would save money on pumps and the cost savings might be enough to offset the slight drop in thermal efficiency with a closed feed water heater especially when we start to encounter effectiveness of the feed water heater because it's real easy to build an effective open feed water heater it's not particularly easy to build an effective closed feed water heater to the same level but that savings might offset the increased cost of complexity and the slight loss of thermal efficiency the last thing i want us to do is to draw a ts diagram of this cycle for that i'm going to start with the same axes and saturation lines as the previous example nope third time's a charm and on this expertly drawn ts diagram i am going to indicate three lines of constant pressure one low pressure one medium pressure and one high pressure and of course this is hugely exaggerated because the goal of this diagram is just to indicate rough shape what i'm looking for is the positioning of our state points relative to one another and i begin by recognizing that states 1 and 3 both had assumed a saturated liquid so 1 and 3 are going to be here and here that was 2.3 right yep and then 2 and 4 are going to be directly above them and i'm going to draw this in black hopefully draw a little bit more contrast and then [Music] do and four then again i have six seven and eight all in a nice little column here so then the remainder of our state points and then for the remainder of our state points we're just going to be looking at this region up here and i got a little bit overconfident when i was drawing my state points here 2 is not on the medium pressure 2 is in the high pressure because again 1 to 2 is going all the way up to the high pressure so i'm left with five and nine and nine and five are both going to be on the high pressure line they are just going to be between four and two i will draw that like this so two gains a little bit of energy to nine four and nine mixed together to yield five five follows a constant pressure process up to six seven comes back to three before going up to four it comes back to one and there's our ts diagram for this cycle if we were to analyze this problem in matlab instead of performing the calculations by hand we end up with something that looks like this so matlab is running through the calculations that we had done by hand using xteam to perform all the property lookups and then determining why using our values for enthalpy calculating a specific work in specific cue in a specific workout and a specific queue out and then calculating a thermal efficiency matlab also has the benefit of being able to plot the ts diagram accurately so on this ts diagram everything is actually to scale i will point out that in my drawing we had exaggerated everything in the compressed liquid region so as to actually indicate how the state points lie relative to one another but in the compressed liquid region the lines of constant pressure appear so close together that they are essentially inseparable when we're looking at an actual graph so when we look at the matlab code it's impossible to differentiate those isobars in the compressed liquid region and those state points over here referring to 2 9 5 and 4 appear all on top of one another another advantage of performing this calculation in matlab is that it allows us to perform changes to our given information and see how that affects the results i could say consider the regenerator pressure and ask the question what happens if the regenerator pressure is changed from 40 to 50. we could change it to 50 and watch how this changes our thermal efficiency went from 31 on the nose to 31.07 we saw that it increased and if i wanted to i could wrap this code in a loop and have it perform the calculation oh i don't know maybe a thousand times and graph the results this takes a second because it has to do a lot of calculations here let me make that figure a little bit bigger so hopefully it's easier to read bring it over so on this figure i'm showing thermal efficiency as a function of regenerator pressure in the center we can see that the optimum thermal efficiency is going to occur at a regenerated pressure of i don't know maybe 80 or 90 psi and then on the left graph i'm showing how y changes as a function of regenerator pressure so we can't just have a y value of 0.8 it is a function of the pressure at which we are extracting the steam and then on the right graph i'm just plotting thermal efficiency as a function of that y value so the y value corresponding to a regenerator pressure that yields the highest thermal efficiency is about 0.15