Condensing steam

[rambo]

Hi, i know this might be a bit of deja-vu, but i was thinking about the amount of steam being released into the sky and i was wondering about how to condense most of the steam so that wastage is reduced drastically and after seperating the oil , the water may be reused. The basic purpose is to stop draining the water table and feed the water back into the boiler. I did come up with a very rudimentary idea.

" Use a 12ft. high cylindrical chamber and let the steam be fed from the bottom. Have a series of pipes running inside the chamber like a radiator and feed water in it using a pump. this water can be gotten out at the top and fed into a kinda reservoir by sprinkling it through a shower-type nozzle. this will help cool the water as it falls into the reservoir . "

the problem with this idea is that the water in the pipes is soon to reach temperatures as high as the steam and there is no way to cool it down to maybe cold temperatures.
We DO have a heat exchanger which is being used to preheat the water in the boiler but it doesnt condense all the steam. This is the prequel to the oil/water mix problem actually. once we can do this, the oil can be looked into.

i have sent queries to a few companies for skimmers and even spoke to CIagent as suggested by you all in the previous thread, however, one restriction is that the oil content in the water is about 0.1%. Low, i know but till 100% is removed, the water cannot be used. still awaiting their opinion.

[Bentiron1946]

I suppose that you could recover all of your steam and condensate and with a separate process, skim the oil and then vaporize your water, condense it, thereby recovering it that way. Contaminated water is a bane to boilers. I don't want to rain on your parade of saving the water table but sometimes it is just better to let the steam vapor join into the water vapor system and hope that through rain fall it gets into the ground water again. You can use a heat exchange to heat as well as cool water. It all depends on if you are running on how you are running the heat exchanger. Heat exchangers can be used to preheat or pre-cool it all depends on what you are trying to do. On most steam systems you have a condensate line that runs back to the boiler from the point of use for the steam. You aren't using steam all of the time so some of the steam will condense and turn back to water. Some system have no return and just dump the condensate to a floor drain. The condensate goes back to a condensate receiver. This condensate receiver is where you reclaimed, oil free water should go. I wonder if a centrifugal separator would work or a vacuum separator?

[ptree]

Rambo, Boilers and their feedwater systems are a bit complicated. One wants to never waste any of the heat invested in heating the water to make steam, and none of the precious condensate that is usually pure water. In a lubricated steam hammer the rather large amount of oil entrained in the steam ends up in the condensate, and is hard to clean enough to use as feedwater. Any oil at all and you start to get foaming in the boiler, which is not good. I mentioned the silencer previously, and its main goal was to silence the roar of the exhaust steam as it reached the atmosphere. It did have a recovery drain, but the recovered condensate would be quite oily. I do not think this steam was reused at the drop hammer shop I worked at in recollection.The CI Agent may work, but only testing will tell. There will be heat still in the condensate, and it can and should be used to preheat feed water.

Condensate return systems often used on heating systems return pure water to the condensate return tank. This tank will be vented, and even if the condensate is pure liquid there will usually be flashing to steam as the slight pressure in the condensate return line is lost as the condensate enters the tank. This water is pure gold. deaireated, hot to almost boiling and no impurities. Makes excellent feedwater. One must have the tank elevated by at least a meter or so above the feedwater pump suction ports to prevent the water again flashing to steam in the small suction negative head. If the steam flashes in the pump it will cavitate, and quickly wreck the pump. Cavatation will often make a gravel crushing or nest of bees buzz.

Try searching the net for a copy of the Boiler operators manual by the ASME. It will have a great deal of info.

[rambo]

thanks for the suggestions. i need to mull things over in my head before i can come up with new questions. hope thats fine. :)