On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 3:26 PM, David Roberson <[email protected]> wrote: > This humid warm air would enter the steam piping and the water would > immediately begin to condense upon every surface.
Right, especially given that the pipes are connected to the air cooler, and that the external temperature was around 15 degrees. > This would lead to > elevated readings of the thermocouple at the steam pipe and also would > result in liquid water pooling within the dissipaters and plumbing. Yes. > There would be far too low of a pressure at this time to expel the water to > the exterior bins so it would pool. > Now, when one of the ECATs finally generates enough energy to start to boil, > this initial fresh supply of hot vapor would have to vaporize the water > standing within the output system. And that will also cause temperature and pressure to rise and then possibly push water that obstructs smaller pipes, clearing the way and creating a pressure/temperature drop. > If the process that I have proposed is true, then the water levels > within the various ECAT devices would not have to be at full. The > problem with the measurement of liquid water trapped would also > become much less of an issue. Furthermore, now the output of the 1 > MW system could consist of mainly vapor and the HVAC guy most likely > performed his task correctly. If 60 kW was expended during 1.5 hour (from 11:00 to 12:30) to bring water from 30 to 100 degrees, that's 324 MJ; the corresponding amount of water is 1102 kg. Since there are 321 sub-modules, that's 3.43 l of water per sub-module. Each module is about 30 x 40 x 50 cm3 or 60 l. So each sub-module is less than 20 l. Having 3.43 l of water in a 20 l sub-module sounds perfectly reasonable without them being full. That also gives a good safety margin, since the power per module when running at 470 kW is 1.46 kW. That will evaporate 2.23 kg of water in one hour, enough time to find or fix a problem or shut the thing down. So Dave's theory is that condensed water in the pipes causes clogs and thus pressure and thus temperature fluctuations. I like that idea, but maybe someone knows better. -- Berke Durak
