If i may quote you: "...I was told by my boss to determine the volume of water will be converted into steam ...."
Can i ask if "determine" is the exact word he used? and if he explained why he wanted this information?
You have two approaches to the answer and you may require one or both. The first is the theortcial calculation which requires, as has been indicated by other contributors, some estimation of efficiency i.e. the theoretical efficiency. I hinted in one of my replies that you could "determine" the answer simply by looking at how much fuel you historically use to raise an amount of steam represented by the amount of make-up water consumed. Thus you may also have to take a look at your fuel records to see how much your fuel quality varies. Fuel quality, especially the heavier grades, is notoriously variable, contamination is a natural hazard in fuel supply and storage, both incidental and deliberate (corruption can be a serious problem... at one site i attended during a power station commissioning the fuel was found to be so well adulterated with water the engineers said you could shower in it! At another site i was told they used commercial grades of fuel for boiler operations. Then they produced their records... as a petrochemical plant they were not averse to burning their mistakes as fuel!) so how do you account for the effects of fuel variability? This may require you to break down the historical data and correlate it with performance. Do you have any established performance indicators? Do you have fuel analysis records? Do you have independent testing of fuels?
Your theoretical calculation may not tell you the whole story nor answer your bosses real needs.
In most burner operations efficiency depends on creating an effectiove spray pattern via the burner nozzles such that the fuel is fully combusted in the most appropriate region of the boiler. If the fuel viscosity at injection is too low a soft non pentrating spray may be created which not only doesn't mix properly with the air, it burns in the wrong place. If the viscosity is too high then large droplets are created which don't burn quickly enough and the result is burning fuel collecting on the boiler tubes with increased soot production (and soot blowing) and the higher risk of tube burn out. In the fuel supply to large diesel engines (because the fuel is usually less viscous and is filtered and centrifuged before the engines), the viscosity is controlled by a viscometer which measures the viscosity and adjusts the fuel heaters accordingly to maintain optimum viscosity. In burner operations viscometers have been quite unable to manage the fuel quality so it is more usual to control the fuel heaters using tfuel temperature as the controlling parameter. This is very inexact. It requires a number of compensating actions. These include a combination of daily fuel analysis and re-calculation of the optimum fuel temperature to assure the fuel viscosity is correct, increased air flow to provide excess oxygen to help complete the combustion process and visual flame inspection. Just running on 4.55 excess oxygen can cost a typicl p[etrochemical palnt around £100,000 a year. Tube failures can cost £50,000 per event (plus incidental losses such as lost production) and some unforyunates also suffer heavy fines for pollution. All of which says that efficiency in real operations can be far removed from theoretical. But you should have good historical data, fuel receipts, make up water consumption, suppliers qufuel quality data, in house test data and so on. At the end of the year the accountants want to know operational costs. This generally means how much did we spend and what did we get. How much fuel did we burn and how much steam did we actually raise and so on.
Hence i ask, why does your boss want to know and what does he want to know? Is this an intelectual excercise or a practical one?
PS visit the
web site and look for press releases, there you will find an article about Huntsman chemicals in the Uk talking about the change to viscosity measurement from temperature measurement.