NO LAB!

I got up this morning at 7:10 like I do many mornings. I put on suitable clothes for leaving the house like I do sometimes. I ate breakfast, it was a bowl of small, bland, stale cookies with milk. I packed up my stuff and off I went. BUT today was different. Rather than going to my thermo II lab like I do most Tuesday mornings, I was going to tour the steam plant! The steam plant operates on a cycle much like that of the Rankine cycle. There is a boiler, and steam is produced. In a Rankine cycle the steam would be used to spin turbines to generate electricity, but here it is used only for heat. The plant burns coal. This coal is burnt at prodigious rates. They have a silo that holds 500 tons of coal. At peak operating times, they receive several truckloads of coal every day. They feed into three boilers that are painted like carnival rides and have plaques on them saying where they were built. Seriously, the hoppers above the boilers are blue and the boilers are orange.

That's not even the cool part though. In another adjacent building there are two natural gas motors that are used for power generation at peak times. This is under contract with Duke energy. Like I said there are two of these motors. Each of them is an 8000hp twin turbo-charged v-18. When they are running, the noise level in the room is around 113dB. That is really loud.

I have a test in the morning. I am going to do great on it.