Tag: CHP

Cleaning out: a 2011 Sankey goodie

As I am cleaning out my office – throwing away old notes, brochures and journals – I came across a November 2011 copy of German ‘UmweltMagazin (Environment Magazine). It has this Sankey diagram in an article on CO2-neutral steam generation for bioethanol production.


This Sankey diagram is in German. Flows are kW. This is for a small-scale plant at an agricultural business and heat is used for a destillation unit. The input feed to the steam boiler is primarily off-heat from a CHP plant fired with biomass. Losses are shown as grey arrows, steam as lilac arrows and heat in red. Condensate recovered at the heat excanger is fed back into the steam boiler (green loop).

Sorry for the quality of the scan. And Happy New Year to all of you! Will be back in 2019 with more Sankey diagrams.

CHP in Hospital, e!Sankey 4 Sample

Closing my blogging activities for this year with a simple, clear, colorful Sankey diagram. This one is shipped with the demo version of e!Sankey 4 as a sample diagram.

This is for energy flows (heat and electricity) in a hospital. Flows are in MWh per year. Natural gas is used to fire a steam boiler and two cogeneration (CHP) units. Heat is used directly for heating in hospital buildings (red arrows). Power from CHP and electricity from the grid shown as yellow arrows.

Cogeneration Visualized – Part 1

I love Google’s image search. This is one of the main sources for new Sankey diagrams on this blog.

The other day I used the Czech term for cogeneration (‘kogenerace’) … and immediately had five new diagrams to share with you. Two of them can be found below…

As in most cogeneration schema diagrams, two energy production systems are compared in one diagram. The classic one, and the combined heat and power CHP system. Heat (teplo) and electricity (elektrina) output is set to the same size and primary energy requirement is being compared. Losses (ztráty) branch out to the other side. In the first one these two systems (found on the EkoWATT website) are shown in a vertical orientation:

The second one (from All for Power website) has a horizontal orientation:

The cogeneration system is 1.4 times more efficient (140:100) in the first diagam, the second Sankey diagram has cogeneration 1.47 times more efficient (100:68).

Two or three more to come in another post next time.