The Rankine Cycler™ steam turbine system, produced by Turbine Technologies, Ltd., is a tabletop-sized
working model of a fossil-fueled steam power plant. It is a tool for hands-on teaching
of fundamentals of thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and instrumentation systems
in an undergraduate laboratory.
Inevitably, when a power generation plant is scaled-down and it has few efficiency-enhancing
components (e.g., feedwater heaters), energy losses in components will be magnified,
substantially lowering the cycle efficiency from values presented in textbooks and realized in
real world power plants. Therefore, faculty and students at two different universities undertook a
study of the Rankine Cycler to determine its effectiveness as a pedagogical tool and to
characterize the device with a comprehensive experimental analysis. This analysis can be useful
to faculty and students who use the equipment and can also be useful to potential customers of
Turbine Technologies.