Month: April 2007

Energy Losses in Industrial Ceramic Furnace

Here are two Sankey diagrams that show the energy losses in an industrial ceramic furnace. The diagrams are oriented top-down. The labels are in German.

The Sankey diagram in blue shows the energy use in an industrial ceramic furnace. The flows are shown in absolute values and in percentage values.

The second diagram in red is similar to the blue one, but it only show the relative flows in percentiles. Additionally the flows entering the diagram at the top have been separated to show their shares. Other flows (‘Rest’) have been grouped together and the individual contributions are shown on the label.

Energy Balance for Stoves in Indian Silk Industry

This article on the FAO website shows a comparison of several types of simples stoves and their energy balance using Sankey diagrams.

The Sankey diagrams show how the energy (typically from wood firing) is lost, and that only a small fraction of 12 to 20 % is actually being used as “useful heat”.

More of these “heat flow diagrams” can be found in chapter 4.2. of the article.

A rather special feature of the diagrams shown in this article is that the percentile values given for the flows cover a range (e.g. Ash and Char 5,97% – 12,15%), rather than a specific absolute value. This is rather untypical. Also, it can be noted, that the width of the arrows are not always to scale: compare, for example, the width of the “Surface” arrrow to that of the “Thermal Mass” arrow. It should be roughly four times wider.

The same Sankey diagram created with a Sankey software tool shows the arrow widths correctly.