Optimum thermal design of steam pipelines and its impact on environment pollution

The majority portion of electric power generated production all over the world - produced by conventional and nuclear fuels produced by steam. Moreover, steam is used extensively in electronic, food, seawater desalination, and many other industries. In the last fifty years, little improvements have been made on the thermal efficiency of steam boilers. The major developments have been carried out in the direction of maintaining this efficiency on low-grade fuel and reducing labor and maintenance charges. Because the annual cost of fuel (nuclear and non-nuclear) is often greater than the combined cost of other expenses in steam power plants, greater amount of money can be saved. Designing steam pipelines in such a way that minimizing the total annual cost of pipes can do this. This can be done by optimal design of the total annual cost of the pipe lines, which includes the cost of insulation material, the cost of burned fuel plus the cost of maintenance. To deal with such situation, a case study of a superheated main steam pipeline at Shobrah Elkhema power plant is investigated. A general simplified working formula for calculating the heat transfer coefficient round a tube has been correlated and verified to facilitate the development for of the heat transfer mathematical model together with the steam pipeline total cost algorithm. The total cost algorithm has been optimized and solved by a digital computer program derived specially for this study. Accordingly, the obtained results are presented in a graphical form and analyzed. The results revealed that the optimal steam pipeline insulation must be chosen carefully. The insulation thickness of 0.225 up to 0.235 m, covers the operating time of 10-20 years, and fuel price of 0.125 up to more than 0.2$/kg. The calculated optimized insulation thickness minimizes the emission of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and carbon dioxide from 375, 75 and 26,778 kg/m/y to less than 7, 1.7 and 590 kg/m.y respectively