How does an oil power plant work?
There are different designs of oil power plants. Most of them generate electricity like conventional steam power plants that run on coal, natural gas or nuclear energy. But also modern combined heat and power plants are often oil power plants.
How a steam power plant works
Except for the generation of electricity through chemical processes, such as in batteries or through photoelectric effects, such as in photovoltaic systems, movement is always necessary for the generation of electricity. To put it simply, this process takes place in the power plants:
- Every steam power plant has a heat source. In an oil power plant, this is usually an oil burner, similar to a heater or an oil stove. The heat is used to heat water to turn it into steam. This is under pressure.
- This steam is now usually first passed through a high-pressure turbine and then through a low-pressure turbine. This rotates them.
- The rotation is used to turn conductors in magnetic fields because, as you probably know, electricity is generated when a loop made of a conductive material is moved in a magnetic field. the magnetic field changes.
- In the last stage, the steam is cooled again so that it becomes water, which is pumped into the area of the heat source.
You can answer the question of how a thermal power plant works with the phrase by ...
That is the principle of how a steam power plant works. Since this process generates a lot of waste heat and oil is an expensive raw material, there is in Germany hardly any oil power plants of this type. Only one was in operation in Switzerland.
Modern types of oil power plants
- Instead of just generating heat during combustion, a turbine is driven directly by the heat of combustion in gas turbine power plants. The combustion takes place in the turbine and the escaping hot exhaust gases provide the drive. In or combined cycle power plants (gas and steam combined cycle power plants), the heat is then used to generate steam and drives another turbine.
- Even generators that generate electricity via a diesel engine are, strictly speaking, oil-fired power plants. Modern block-type thermal power stations are based on these, in which electricity is generated via an oil-powered motor and the waste heat is used for heating.
In general, oil power plant only describes the fuel that is used to generate electricity, the term does not say anything about how the power plant works.
