ABBOTT POWER PLANT
Our goal is to calculate the net work and heat transfer for each process in the Rankine cycle for the Abbott Power Plant, as well as the efficiency of the cycle and the power produced by the turbines. The Abbott Power Plant uses two energy sources at different points of the year. One is natural gas, and the other is coal. The use of coal boilers versus natural gas boilers changes our results, so we seek to calculate both.
ASSUMPTIONS
For our calculation, we are assuming that we are working with an ‘ideal’ Rankine cycle. We neglect the heat transfer between the parts of the plant and their surroundings, such as the heat transfer from the boiler to the surroundings (instead of the working fluid). We are also ignoring kinetic and potential energy changes, based on changing speeds and heights of the moving fluid. Also in this case we neglect friction between the working fluid and the plant components, but it would make a big difference in the actual performance of the plant. The last assumption is that every component is in a steady state—the constant state variables of each component don’t vary throughout the process. All assumptions show up in our calculations for each process; they allow us to assume that the pump and turbine processes are isentropic—that they are both adiabatic and completely reversible—among other things (Reisel, 2015).