Steam has come a long way from its traditional associations with locomotives and the Industrial Revolution. Today, it serves as an integral and essential part of modern technology. Without it, our food, textile, chemical, medical, power, heating and transport industries could not exist or perform as they do.

Steam provides a means of transporting controllable amounts of energy from a central, automated boiler house, where it can be efficiently and economically generated, to the point of use. Therefore, as steam moves around a plant, it can be considered to be both the transport and provision of energy.

For many reasons, steam is one of the most widely used commodities for conveying heat energy. Its use is popular throughout the industry for a broad range of tasks from mechanical power production to space heating and process applications.

In this course, we will look at Boilers from an energy perspective and we wanted to ensure that we build this on strong foundation basic. So, in this course we try to answer the following questions:

1. What we mean by a boiler in a simple term?

2. How energy and heat transfer inside boilers?

3. What are the typical boilers types used in the industry and what is the main characteristics for each type?

4. How we treat the boiler feed water and why it is important to monitor its quality?

5. Why we need to remove air and non-condensable gases from the steam system and how we can do this?

6. How we can calculate boiler efficiency?

7. How energy flows inside the boiler and what is the typical types of energy losses?

8. What is the total life cycle cost of running a boiler and why energy is the most significant part of this value?

9. What is the typical energy-saving opportunities at steam generation/production side?

10. Case study: How we can avoid wasting money in the air by minimizing heat losses from thermal insulation?