Modern Engineering Thermodynamics

13.10 Modern Steam Power Plants 481
FIGURE 13.28
Chiba Japan 2800 MW CCGT power plant with turbines supplied by GE and Mitsubishi. The facility cost $1.5 billion and was completed in 2000.
HOW DANGEROUS ARE BOILER EXPLOSIONS?
Between 1898 and 1902, there were 1600 boiler explosions
in the United States, in which 1184 people were killed. On
March 10, 1905, a boiler explosion in a shoe factory in
Brockton, Massachusetts, killed 58 people and injured an
additional 117 people (Figure 13.29); and on December 6,
1906, a similar explosion occurred in a shoe factory in
Lynn, Massachusetts. As a result of the ensuing public outcry,
the state of Massachusetts enacted the first legal code
of rules for the construction of steam boilers, in 1907.
From 1908 to 1910, Ohio and various other states enacted
similar legislation, but because no two states had exactly
the same code, boiler manufacturers had great difficulty
satisfying all the varying and occasionally conflicting rules.
In 1911, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers
(ASME) joined with the boiler manufacturers to formulate
a set of uniform standards for the design and construction
of safe boilers. The first edition of the resulting ASME
Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code was produced in 1914,
and by the 1930s, many advancements in boiler technology
had been made. An updated and modernized version
of this code is used throughout industry today.
FIGURE 13.29
Brockton shoe factory explosion.
Modern power plant performance can be expressed in four ways:
1. The actual thermal efficiency (η T ) actual , where
ðη T Þ actual
ð _W out Þ net
/ _Q in
actual
Typical ranges of this efficiency are shown in Figure 13.30 for various power-producing technologies.