Why does steam contain so much energy?

If you've ever burned yourself with steam, you'll know it's incredibly
painfuland much more so than an ordinary hot water burn. If water
and steam are at the same temperature, why does steam hurt more?
Simply because it contains much more energy. To turn 1kg of water at
100C into 1kg of steam at the same temperature, you need to supply
about 2257 kilojoules of energy, or roughly 1000 times as much as an
electric kettle or toaster uses in one second. That's an absolutely huge
amount of energy! It's what we call the latent heat of vaporization of
water: it's the energy you have to supply to move the molecules in the
water far enough apart to turn the boiling hot liquid into a hot gas.
So why does steam hurt more? If 100C boiling water hits your body, it
cools down and gives up its heat; that's the energy that burns you. If
100C steam hits your body, it first turns back to water and then cools
down, burning you the same way as the hot water but also giving up the
latent heat of vaporization to your body. It's this extra massive dose of
heat energy that makes a steam burn so much more serious and painful
than a hot water burn. On the positive side, this latent energy "hidden" in
steam is what makes it so useful in steam engines and steam turbines!
What is a turbine?

A turbine is a spinning wheel that gets its energy from a gas or

liquid moving past it. A windmill or a wind turbine takes energy from the
wind, while a waterwheel or water turbine is usually driven by
a river flowing over, under, or around it. Now you can't produce energy
out of thin air: a basic law of physics called the conservation of energy
tells us that a gas or liquid always slows down or changes direction
when it flows past a turbine, losing at least as much energy as the
turbine gains. Blow on the windmill stuck in your sandcastle and it spins
around. What you can't see is that your breath slows down quite

dramatically: on the other side of the windmill, the air from your mouth is
traveling much slower! Read more in our introduction to turbines.
What is a steam turbine?

As its name suggests, a steam turbine is powered by the energy in hot,

gaseous steamand works like a cross between a wind turbine and a
water turbine. Like a wind turbine, it has spinning blades that turn when
steam blows past them; like a water turbine, the blades fit snugly inside
a sealed outer container so the steam is constrained and forced past
them at speed. Steam turbines use high-pressure steam to turn
electricity generators at
incredibly
high
speeds,
so
they
rotate much faster than either wind or water turbines. (A typical power
plant steam turbine rotates at 18003600 rpmabout 100200 times
faster than the blades spin on a typical wind turbine, which needs to use
a gearbox to drive a generator quickly enough to make electricity.) Just
like in a steam engine, the steam expands and cools as it flows past a
steam turbine's blades, giving up as much as possible of the energy it
originally contained. But, unlike in a steam engine, the flow of the steam
turns the blades continually: there's no push-pull action or waiting for a
piston to return to position in the cylinder because steam is pushing the
blades around all the time. A steam turbine is also much more compact
than a steam engine: spinning blades allow steam to expand and drive a
machine in a much smaller space than a piston-cylinder-crank
arrangement would need. That's one reason why steam turbines were
quickly adopted for powering ships, where space was very limited.
Parts of a steam turbine

All steam turbines have the same basic parts, though there's a lot of
variation in how they're arranged.

Rotor and blades

Running through the center of the turbine is a sturdy axle called
the rotor, which is what takes power from the turbine to an electricity
generator (or whatever else the turbine is driving). The blades are the
most important part of a turbine: their design is crucial in capturing as
much energy from the steam as possible and converting it into rotational
energy by spinning the rotor round. All turbines have a set of rotating
blades attached to the rotor and spin it around as steam hits them. The
blades and the rotor are completely enclosed in a very
sturdy, alloy steel outer case (one capable of withstanding high
pressures and temperatures).
Impulse and reaction turbines
In one type of turbine, the rotating blades are like deep buckets. Highvelocity jets of incoming steam from carefully shaped nozzles kick into
the blades, pushing them around with a series of impulses, and
bouncing off to the other side with a similar pressure but much-reduced
velocity. This design is called an impulse turbine and it's particularly
good at extracting energy from high-pressure steam.
In an alternative design called a reaction turbine, there's a second set of
stationary blades attached to the inside of the turbine case. These help
to speed up and direct the steam onto the rotating blades at just the
right angle, before it leaves with reduced temperature and pressure but
broadly the same velocity as it had when it entered. This design is
known as a reaction turbine. Both sets of blades have to be made from
incredibly tough materials capable of rotating at very high speeds with
high-pressure steam blowing at them the whole time

Other parts
Apart from the rotor and its blades, a turbine also needs some sort of
steam inlet (usually a set of nozzles that direct steam onto either the
stationary or rotating blades).
Steam turbines also need some form of control mechanism that
regulates their speed, so they generate as much or as little power as
needed at any particular time. Most steam turbines are in huge power
plants driven by enormous furnaces and it's not easy to reduce the
amount of heat they produce. On the other hand, the demand (load) on
a power planthow much electricity it needs to makecan vary
dramatically and relatively quickly. So steam turbines need to cope with
fluctuating output even though their steam input may be relatively
constant. The simplest way to regulate the speed is using valves that
release some of the steam that would otherwise go through the turbine.