Example: Safety Valve

Example: Safety Valve

The mass flow limitation must be considered for the design of safety valves. As an example we consider a steam boiler that produces 10t/ h of saturated vapor at p0 = 15 bar (so that T0 = 471 K). In case of emergency, all steam produced must be discharged through a safety valve. We compute the mini- mum cross section the valve can have under the assumption that the steam can be described as an ideal gas with constant specific heats and k = 1.135. Solving (14.31) for the cross section gives, with the ideal gas law p0 = ρ0RT0,