Discussion

In order to properly optimize the steam turbine power plant, we had a couple requirements that had to be issued. First the minimum required efficiency of 50% but during our calculations we were calculating an efficiency of about 58%. When we look at the our graph of the temperature at the inlet versus the efficiency we noticed that in order to increase the efficiency we had to reduce the temperature in the first inlet or raise the temperature almost over 800C. If we had reduced the inlet temperature then we would also reduce the temperature in the boiler and this would reduce the area under the T-S diagram which would result in less overall work. If we were to increase the temperature over 800C then we would risk damaging the turbine blades as well some of the components required for the steam plant to run. An option that we would have would be to select material that has a higher heat resistance. This may raise the initial cost of constructing the steam turbine plant, but in the long run it would increase the efficiency of the plant, our resulting unit cost of the fuel was approximately 0.4$/KW-hr .Another interesting matter was the mass flow rate which we had of almost 457.7 kg/sec using such a high mass flow rate would require large turbines to accommodate such a large mass flow.