At 06:22 AM 7/21/2011, Damon Craig wrote:
Look, guys. If no one is pursuing the "really wet steam" theory anymore the steam wetness issue is pretty much moot. Sorry if I didn't realize that.
I have to say that "really wet steam" is not implausible, Joshua has made a decent case for it. However, I'm now looking at what the pressure implications would be from converting 5 g/sec of steam inside a chamber with a half-inch orifice and a temperature of, say, 100.6 degrees, 1 degree above ambient boiling point. Is this a consistent picture? It looks like it is. If we knew more exact numbers, we could calculate the vaporization rate!
Originally, you may recall, numbers caste about were as high as 97% liquid by mass. This is dense enough a chunk of oak would float in it. Even 10% mass exceeds our usual experiences of steam wetness in my estimate. I was interested in buoyancy, not entrainment in a moving fluid.
Personally, I have no close contact with steam. Fortunately, I still have functional skin left. Boiler chambers are generally designed to minimize wetness of steam, but it's not impossible to design something that would make really wet steam. That steam would probably separate into the two phases, more distinctly, depending on flow rate, probably. It would also look like mist immediately on exit from the steam escape valve. It would not look like live steam, as would, say, 5% wetness steam.
I have no doubt that with deliberate design, one could get very high wetness. 97% seems pretty difficult to me. But the same mass ratio, if we include water overflow, could easily be 97%, and there would be relatively dry steam above liquid water. That ratio obviously exists at some point at the E-Cat fires up!
Steam wetness is still an interesting question, in and off itself, but not that interesting here, unless there is anyone still arguing it. It seems it would take a huge amount of energy to randomly break surface tension so often to generate buoyant droplets, such that the argument would defeat itself.
Ugh. There isn't any requirement that the droplets be at any given bouyancy. Introducing serious complication in the presence of ignorance isn't the path to knowledge. One step at a time, folks.
The densest suspensions one might likely find are at the base of a Niagara Falls and I don't think this would float a cork.
Sure it would. You've forgotten something, mass flow. You are assuming a stationary "steam." Rather, the whole mess, steam and water, may be flowing rapidly, keeping it quite mixed up.
There are other approaches to the problem that are far more sound.
