Rankine steam power cycle (pump -> boiler -> turbine -> condenser) — a STEAM process flowsheet
The classic steam power cycle behind most of the world's electricity, on the rigorous IAPWS-97 steam properties. Feedwater is pressurized by a boiler-feed pump, fired to superheated steam in the boiler, expanded through a steam turbine to make shaft power, then condensed back to water in the surface condenser. The four Rankine components appear in order, and the numbers are the real thermodynamic ones: at 60 bar / 500 degC steam expanding to a 0.1-bar condenser vacuum the turbine makes ~18 MW of shaft work at 85% isentropic efficiency, the exhaust leaves the turbine as wet steam (~92% quality, the classic low-pressure blade-erosion concern), the condenser rejects ~40 MW to cooling water, and the feed pump costs only ~0.15 MW (the small back-work ratio that makes the Rankine cycle practical, since pressurizing a liquid is nearly free next to expanding a gas). Cycle thermal efficiency comes out ~28%. Every property (the superheat enthalpy, the isentropic expansion endpoint, the exhaust steam quality) is the real IAPWS steam-table value, not a correlation.
Modeling assumptions & limitations
- 1An open (once-through) view of the cycle rather than a physically closed loop (a real plant recirculates the condensate); no reheat or feedwater regeneration stage (a single expansion, no extraction), so the efficiency is the simple ideal-cycle figure, not a supercritical/reheat station's ~45%.
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- Rigorous STEAM thermodynamics, solved by the same engine every simulation runs on.
- 4 unit operations modeled: PUMP, Boiler, Turbine, Condenser.
- Focus areas: Rankine cycle, Steam turbine, Power generation, Boiler, IAPWS.
- Verified fast convergence — a real, measured solve time, not an estimate.
- Thermodynamics
- STEAM
- Components
- water
- Unit operations
- PUMPBoilerTurbineCondenser
Opens in a new tab, loaded straight into the app — no setup.
Read the step-by-step guideReproduce this exact result from Python — the real client.get_example() → run_and_wait() path, not a mockup.
from flowsim.sdk import FlowSimClient
client = FlowSimClient()
example = client.get_example("rankine-steam-power-cycle")
sim = client.create_simulation(example["title"], example["flowsheet"])
result = client.run_and_wait(sim["id"])
print(result["status"]) # "converged"
streams = client.streams(sim["id"])Related models
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