1.2a Fossil-Fueled Steam Power PlantsThere are many reasons to choose the fossil-fueled steam power plant as anapplication of thermodynamics. First, and foremost, is the overwhelmingimportance of such power plants to our daily existence. Imagine how your lifewould be changed if you did not have access to electrical power, or lessseverely, if electricity had to be rationed so that it would be available to youonly a few hours each day! It is easy to forget the blessings of essentiallylimitless electrical power available to residents of the United States. That thesource of our electricity is dominated by the combustion of fossil fuels isevident from an examination of Table 1.1. Here we see that approximately71% of the electricity produced in the United States in 2002 had its origin inthe combustion of a fossil fuel, that is, coal, gas, or oil. A second reason forour choice of steam power plants as an integrating application is the historicalsignificance of steam power. The science of thermodynamics was born, inpart, from a desire to understand and improve the earliest steam engines. JohnNewcomen’s first coal-fired steam engine (1712) predates the discovery ofthe fundamental principles of thermodynamics by more than a hundred years!The idea later to be known as the second law of thermodynamics waspublished by Sadi Carnot in 1824; the conservation of energy principle, or thefirst law of thermodynamics, was first presented by Julius Mayer in 1842.1

In this chapter we present the basic steam power plant cycle and illustratesome of the hardware used to accomplish this cycle. In subsequent chapters, wewill add devices and complexity to the basic cycle. Figure 1.1 shows the basicsteam power cycle, or Rankine2 cycle. Water (liquid and vapor) is the workingfluid in the closed loop 1–2–3–4–1. The water undergoes four processes: