Making Steam?
Most recent answer: 04/28/2014
- Mike (age 17)
Edmonds, WA
There are a couple of parts to this. You ask "what would the speed of the steam?" I'm not sure if you mean how fast the water molecules in it move, or something else. The typical speed of the water molecules is easy to calculate using equpartition: the rms speed is sqrt(3kT/m) where m is the mass of a water molecule, k is Boltzmann's constant, and T is the absolute temperature. You can look them up and do that calculation.
What about how fast the steam is formed? You're putting energy in by doing work on the piston. You can calculate the power your putting in, we don't have the info needed. Before it boils it takes a little while to get the water to the boiling point, but the total amount of heat needed to get some water from room temperature to boiling is much less than the amount needed to boil it, described by the latent heat of vaporization. So most of the time is spent in the boiling, not in heating things up first. While the steam is forming, most of that energy should be going into the latent heat, which you can look up. Dividing the power by the latent heat per mole will tell you how fast the steam is forming, say in moles/second.
Mike W.
(published on 04/28/2014)