# How to calculate temperature to maintain specific pressure in steam kettle

My friend and I are building a steam kettle with a turbine attached for a uni project. We've designed a system where we have a spherical kettle with a volume of 3.3 L. From the kettle, we lead the steam through a 10mm pipe to a steam turbine, which also has a 10 mm outlet. We heat the kettle by burning gas below it. We want to have roughly 2 litres of water in the boiler to start off with.

Before we do anything, we want to calculate what temperature we need to achieve a pressure of roughly 2 bars inside the boiler, but we're not sure where to start. We're not looking for an answer, but rather some pointers for where to start.

You just need to find the temperature at which the vapour pressure of water is two bar, or presumably three bar since I'm guessing you want the pressure to be two bar above atmospheric.

Googling will find you tables of vapour pressure vs temperature, for example there is one here. The vapour pressure is two bar at about $121$ºC and three bar at about $134$ºC.

• +1 Nice answer. Assumption made: there will only be water vapor in the kettle, which is not a bad one, I think. – Deep Feb 14 '17 at 4:46