sparger

David Penz

I would appreciate guidance to design a steam sparger.

I have hot water leaving a heat exchanger at 240F and 50psig. The hot water passes through a throttle control valve and mixes with cold water at 90F and 15psig, to make a mixed flow that leaves the system at 145F and 15psig.

The sparger would therefore pass a mixture of hot water and flash steam. It would ideally break up the steam into small bubbles that would condense rapidly without causing much turbulence. This process is not different from that of a steam trap discharging into a condensate pipe at lower temperature and pressure.

Is a sparger device even needed? I estimate I will have about 3% by weight flash steam. Given mixed flow through a perforated tube type sparger, what should be the design pipe velocity, sparger hole size and total hole area?

Are sparger design guidelines or "rules of thumb" available?

Brad White_191

Sparger

Spirax-Sarco I believe makes them (in stainless steel). Skidmore and other boiler feed unit manufacturers also offer these within packaged equipment. Spirax-Sarco's publications, "Steam Utilization" and "Hook-Ups" may also yield something for you but my copies are in the office.

I have seen enough field-rigged sparger tubes made up in Sch. 40 steel, usually just 2.5" pipe with holes drilled in the sides. What size? No idea. How determined? Even less. Yet, they worked... Now I am curious...

Tony Conner_2

Tony Conner_2

These Scans Are From...

... Spirax Sarco booklet I was given years ago. It's part of a set, and I was given a 3 or 4 different ones by a salesman I knew, but he didn't have the whole set either. They were published in the UK, so the pipe sizes are British.