Steam Rankine plant
Temperature gradientWorking-fluid expansion (heat-engine cycle)Mechanical motionRotating-machine generator actionCharge carriersElectrical work
Heat raises steam; the turbine turns the generator. Most of the world's thermal electricity.
Member of Natural-gas combined-cycle plant as its bottoming-cycle, Pressurised-water reactor steam plant as its secondary-steam-cycle — a system whose other members and handoffs carry what this route alone cannot.
Epistemic state of the route
- known constituent relations
- 5 / 5 established or replicated · weakest constituent established
- constituent maturity floor
- K4 · experimentally observed
- search for this exact route
- A recorded pathway or a reviewed search records a demonstration of this composition.
- recorded pathway
- Steam Rankine plant · commercial
- composition maturity
- K8 · commercial technology — Rankine cycle plant
- recorded-pathway overlap
- this route is the recorded pathway Steam Rankine plant
- auxiliaries off the route
- recirculating work · mechanical · feedwater pump: condensed working fluid is pumped from condenser pressure to boiler pressure before heat addition; pump work is an internal cycle load and whole-cycle net efficiency includes it; Al-Mosyab Unit 3 (Shaheed, Mohammed & Radhi 2023, read in full): three main boiler feedwater pumps and three condensate pumps with a deaerator return the condensate to the 152 bar main-steam pressure; the boiler feed pump appears in the unit's exergy ledger (Table 4) (recorded on the reviewer's pass-36 ruling; not on pathway:steam-engine (a generic spelling demonstrated by the Rankine transducer — a pathway-specificity item for a later architecture audit) and not on pathway:nuclear-steam-plant (which owes the pressure-drop provider and awaits a source review of its named architecture))
- route-level evidence
- 3 sources for the complete composition · 6 cited by the constituent steps
- boundaries and interfaces
- BOUNDARY compatible · no region transition
Explorematrix context · physics checks · performance · steps · route evidence · constituent evidence · cite
Matrix context
D = disequilibrium row · C = coupling family column. A cell reads the state of the atlas for that pair.
D.01 × C.08 · Temperature gradient × Heat engine (thermomechanical)family: Heat engine (thermomechanical)D.01 × C.14 · Temperature gradient × Electromagnetic inductionfamily: Electromagnetic induction
Measured or reported performance
- net plant electrical efficiency47%plant2015Nordjylland unit 3, Denmark (415 MWe, commissioned 1998): once-through ultra-supercritical Benson tower boiler, double reheat, 580 °C / 580 °C / 580 °C at 29 MPa, 10 °C seawater cooling; 2005 performance in power-only mode at 100 % load — generator 411 MWe, auxiliaries 26 MWe, 385 MWe to grid, boiler efficiency 94.2 %, heat rate 7151.4 kJ/kWh on generator output; the world's most efficient pulverised-coal unit as of December 2014 per the IEA Clean Coal Centre — read in full in CCC/255 §7.2.6 and Table 4 (Poulsen & Bendixen 2006); the table's own 47.2 % (400 kV to grid) row sits beside a coal calorific value labelled gross (26 MJ/kg) while the text gives 25.2 MJ/kg LHV / 26.4 MJ/kg HHV, so the atlas records the text's explicit net-LHV statement; the second reader's Morrison 2008 IEA CCC citation (47 % LHV / 44.9 % HHV) could not be located — CCC/255 cites Morrison 2011 for the same fact; the steam temperature and cooling-water temperature are operating states, never the Carnot reservoirsrefs [8]
- unit electrical load at the recorded operating state225 MWplant2023Al-Mosyab thermal power station, Iraq (completed 1990, four 300 MW units), Unit 3 at 225 MW load — Table 1 'general current operation condition': main steam 168 kg/s at 152 bar and 539 °C, crude-oil fuel 14.68 kg/s at NCV 10,074 kcal/kg, condenser pressure 0.1 bar, cooling-water temperature 24 °C, generator 3000 rpm; subcritical single-drum natural-circulation boiler, HP / IP / LP turbines, six closed feedwater heaters and a deaerator — the unit's readings, not the design condition (300 MW, 170 bar, 538 °C, 0.0653 bar, 23 °C cooling water); pressures stay in the conditions text — the registry has no pressure names; the operating-state temperatures never feed the Carnot boundrefs [7]
- cycle thermal efficiency (energy balance of the readings)39.3%model2023derived from the actual 225 MW operating readings above; the same model gives second-law efficiency 34.91 % and exergy destruction 412.68 MW — Source-internal discrepancy: Table 4 reports cycle thermal efficiency 39.3%; surrounding prose reports 39.91%. The atlas records the tabulated value because Table 4 is the paper's declared energy/exergy result table; no reconciliation is supplied by the authors (Figure 2's condenser-pressure sweep gives 39.39 % at 0.06 bar falling to 37.97 % at 0.24 bar; the unit runs at 0.1 bar). Computed, not metered. Not a record figure: efficiency_record 0.47 standsrefs [7]
- best recorded efficiency (derived)
- 47.0% — net plant electrical efficiency, plant, 2015; derived from the structured data above, not a stored number
Typed bounds on this route
Every limit the atlas holds for this route, as constraint records: reached through bounded_by claims on the route's own entities. Hard bounds (an upper bound or a formula) decide the thermodynamic-bound check above; benchmarks, constitutive relations and resource limits are listed and never decisive. No prose limit exists anywhere (pass 42).
- Carnot limit · formula-bound · hard, applies to this routeη ≤ 1 − T_c/T_h for any heat engine between reservoirs at T_h and T_c
- Curzon–Ahlborn efficiency at maximum power · benchmark · listed, never decisiveη_CA = 1 − √(T_c/T_h)
Steps
- 01thermal → mechanical · loss to thermal
- a hot reservoir to heat the working fluid and a cold reservoir to condense or cool it
temperature gradient requiredrefs [1] [2] - 02mechanical → mechanical · loss to thermalrefs [1]
- 03mechanical → electrical · loss to thermal
- a shaft turning a rotor inside a stator, or a magnet moved past a coil
conductor required · magnetic field requiredrefs [3] [4] - 04electrical → electrical · loss to thermalrefs [3] [5]
- 05electrical → electrical · loss to thermal
- carriers driven through an external load at the potential difference the source maintains
refs [6]
Evidence for the complete composition · 3
- [1]A. Bejan. Advanced Engineering Thermodynamics (4th ed.) (2016)
- [7]H. R. Shaheed, H. N. Mohammed, R. M. Radhi. Evaluation Performance of the Steam Power Plant in Iraq Based on Energy and Exergy Analysis (2023)
- [8]K. Nicol. Application and development prospects of double-reheat coal-fired power units (2015)
Evidence for the constituent relations · 6
- [1]A. Bejan. Advanced Engineering Thermodynamics (4th ed.) (2016)
- [2]G. Walker. Stirling Engines (1980)
- [3]M. Faraday. Experimental researches in electricity (1832)
- [4]S. L. Dixon, C. A. Hall. Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics of Turbomachinery (7th ed.) (2014)
- [5]L. D. Landau, E. M. Lifshitz, L. P. Pitaevskii. Electrodynamics of Continuous Media (Course of Theoretical Physics, Vol. 8, 2nd ed.) (1984)
- [6]N. W. Ashcroft, N. D. Mermin. Solid State Physics (1976)
Cite this route
Physical Transformation Atlas (2026). route p-9f97be27de: Steam Rankine plant. Dataset revision rbfbfcbb70e57 (hash of the canonical data). https://physical-transformation-atlas.wldud5192.workers.dev/path/9f97be27de
Ids and matrix addresses are stable across revisions; the revision hash identifies the exact canonical files the record was compiled from and is meta.data_hash in every /api export. Reuse terms: see the license field in any export.