What is a Boiler and How does It Work?
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Published 2019-08-19
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In this video, we are going to discover what an industrial boiler is, and how it works.
But first, let us consider the term heat. Heat is vital in everyone’s day to day lives. Whether it be the heat to warm up our surroundings, or heat to be able to cook food, we all use it to some extent in our day to day activities.
Water and steam are great heat carriers and are not damaging to our environment. The boiling point of water at atmospheric pressure is 100°C or 212°F.
By pressurizing the boiling system by giving it an airtight seal, we can actually increase the boiling point.
This is how pressure cookers work. An airtight vessel to increase the pressure to increase the boiling point. This makes the food cook in a much shorter time than if an open saucepan were to be used.
So how does this compare with an industrial boiler?
Well, for a start, industrial boilers can cope with pressures much higher than a pressure cooker.
Industrial boilers are often made by welding together thick steel plates, allowing extremely high pressures to be made.
It has to be made incredibly strong to cope with the high pressure, as failure to do so will result in forces close to an exploding bomb!
The function of a boiler is to either produce hot water or steam. Hot water boilers heat water for the purpose of domestic or commercial heating and hot water supply.
Steam boilers generate steam in order to power turbines for power generation and various other industrial heating applications.
To visualize the effects of steam generation using a boiler, think of the steam powering a turbine.
When the steam passes through the blades of a turbine, the force turns the blades and accelerates the turbine.
Steam contains an enormous amount of energy, so it makes the turbine quite efficient and, depending on the fuel used to boil the water, quite energy-efficient too.
There are different types of boilers for all sorts of different applications.
We are going to cover a couple of the different types, including how each of the methods is able to generate heat, so you can familiarise yourself, and be able to correctly identify them.
Firstly, fire-tube boilers. The typical make up of this type of boiler is a furnace, a water tank acting as a boiler and a smokestack.
There are tubes running through the water tank carrying the heat from the furnace, and the smokestack vents the heat and gases caused by the heating effect so that the pressure does not continue to rise above the intended level.
So, the fuel is burned inside the furnace. The tubes transfer the heat of the furnace through the water in the tank. Once it is heated, the steam generated is moved along downstream.
Fire-tube boilers tend to be the cheapest type of boiler to produce, as they have a fairly simple construction but are typically limited for low to medium pressure applications due to the thickness of the outer shell containing the water.
Now that we have covered the fire-tube boiler, let’s have a look at a water-tube boiler.
The design is fairly similar to a fire-tube boiler, but instead of the furnace heating fire tubes to heat water in a tank, the furnace heats water tubes inside the furnace. In the same way, a fuel source is burned in the furnace, causing the water tubes inside to heat up.
Once again, when the water is boiled, steam is generated and moved downstream.
A water-tube boiler is more thermally efficient than a fire-tube boiler, but they are more complex to construct and the quality of the water can be a limiting factor. The water may need filtering to operate most effectively.
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All Comments (21)
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Follow RealPars on Instagram www.instagram.com/realparsdotcom/ for daily practical tips and tricks on Industrial automation and electrical engineering topics.
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You have turned me into a multi experience Technician with just your videos.
Thank you. -
You have covered the most basic design of boilers in minutes. Thank you for your great effort
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No one can explain more precisely then Realpars...too good to learn
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This is one of the best channel I have ever seen. Thanks for your videos.
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I have learned alot from realpars videos. It is a great video lesson learning.
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Water quality is key in fired Boilers. Please do a video on methods and technologies for cleaning the inside of the Tubes. And do say something about "soot blowing " the outside of the Tubes. Thanks for the helpful presentation
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I work on boilers for a living, and while you generally have mechanics right (with the exception of the water tube boilers also having a mud drum and steam drum), fire tube boilers are also very common for high pressure steam systems (high pressure steam is 15psi and higher, and I’ve typically seen them run at about 100# of steam).
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Thank you so much for your lesson, I would like to have a Simatic manager step 7.
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Wow great work, thank you realpars team work.
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Thanks for a nice lesson, can you also make a video about a safety relays, how to wire it and they actually work.
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Thanks for this great introductory video - Much appreciated!
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Thanks for the information, very clear, it would be good if you did something regarding the various options of flue gas economizers in boilers and application parameters of the various methods
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I would like to see you go more in depth on the beer making process.
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i used to work for a boiler company Jhon Thompson. the most common boilers that companies use are 10ton coal
boilers because thay are the cheapest to run but needs a lot of maintenance unlike HFO
(oil) and gass burners that are
low to no maintenance. burners are more reliable and easy to use unlike coal boilers that need a operator and break down unexpectedly (a lot). -
Thank you real pars it is good understanding programme
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It's very clear explanation. Thank you.
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Thank you. I’m trying to understand more and more about being a boiler operator so this got me on another level about how boilers work.
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The best video ever on boilers... Thanks a lot
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Very simple & Logical Explanation.
