steam powered boiler

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brucestevenson916

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Im thinking of building a steam powered boiler, just wondered if anyone has any success or failure from this.

My idea is to get a 80L hot water tank cut 30L of the top of it (alongwith the immersion heater) and solder it to the bottom.

As a result, you have a contained water reservoir with a heater underneith the boiler, the boiler will be heated by the steam produced in this resevoir, and there will be run off pipes that will be run around the boiler to act as a steam jacket and a pressure relief.

I will be able to run it at 3bar of pressure so I should be able to get the temp of the resevoir up to 140-150c when boiling.

I am a heating engineer so I have the resources, but I'm wondering if it will work!?
 
Should work perfectly, If you can contain the pressure safely. 3 bar is something like 50 psi.. i dont know i would trust a copper to SS solder to hokd at such pressure? but im not a heating engineer..

Now if you left the copper cylinder close to full size it could double up as a hlt to provide mash and sparge liquor as it heats up towards the boil temps and pressures.. as the lag between heating up the steam and applying that heat to the boil could be significant?

will look forward to the build posts.
 
Nah, typically water pressure in a home is 3-6bar so the tank should be engineered to take more than that, same as the copper pipe work.

Saying that, if it pops I'll be sure to let you know!
 
Hmm actually the tanks are rates to a max of 2.5 bar, so operating at 2 bar I'm not sure you would be able to produce the amount of heat needed to boil 30+ ltrs of wort. As you could maybe only get 110c 115c out of the steam

The real worry is just that the amount of heat provided by boiling water in a chamber underneith is that the heat transference isn't enough, but I have been going back and forward a lot about that.

Surely if you produce say 4kw of heat in the chamber below, allowing for losses due to heat escape (from the chamber into the room) say 25% you still have 3kw transferring into the brew. You could compensate by putting in an additional immersion and bumping the power rating upto 6 kW, or throw an insulation jacket around it to keep the heat losses to a minimum.

Any physics geeks out there?
 
Steam heated jacket on a vessel? No problem. I've seen 2,000l reactors run off high pressure steam. Enough to boil water anyway. Good luck and hope you have good welds
 
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