Chimney

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For the place in Oxfordshire, England, see Chimney, Oxfordshire.

A chimney is a system for venting hot flue gases or smoke from a boiler, stove, furnace or fireplace to the outside atmosphere. They are typically almost vertical to ensure that the hot gases flow smoothly, drawing air into the combustion through the chimney effect (also known as the stack effect). The space inside a chimney is called a flue. Chimneys may be found in buildings, steam locomotives and ships (for the latter, the US term is smokestack (colloquially, stack) and the UK term is funnel). Chimneys are tall to increase their draw of air for combustion and to disperse pollutants in the flue gases over a greater area so as to reduce the pollutant concentrations in compliance with regulatory or other limits.

Chimney stacks on a building in Newcastle upon Tyne, England

Chimney pots in London, England, seen from the tower of Westminster Roman Catholic cathedral

The term chimney may also be applied to natural features, particularly in rock formations.

History

Romans used tubes inside the walls to draw smoke out of bakeries but real chimneys appeared only in northern Europe in the 12th century. Industrial chimneys became common in the late 18th century.

Chimneys have traditionally been built of brick, both in small and large buildings. Early chimneys were of a simple brick construction. Later chimneys were constructed by placing the bricks around tile liners. To control downdrafts venting caps (often called chimney pots) with a variety of designs are sometimes placed on the top of chimneys.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the methods use to extract lead from its ore produced large amounts of toxic fumes. In the north of England, long near-horizontal chimneys were built, often more than 3 km (2 miles) long, which typically terminated in a short vertical chimney in a remote location where the fumes would cause less harm. Lead and silver deposits formed on the inside of these long chimneys, and periodically workers would be sent along the chimneys to scrape off these valuable deposits.

Construction

Due to brick's limited ability to handle transverse loads, chimneys in houses were often built in a "stack", with a fireplace on each floor of the house sharing a single chimney, often with such a stack at the front and back of the house. Today's central heating systems have made chimney placement less critical, and the use of non-structural double-wall metal piping allows it to be bent around obstructions and through walls. In fact, modern high-efficiency furnaces do not require a chimney and can vent sideways through a wall.

Industrial chimneys are commonly referred to as flue gas stacks and are typically external structures, as opposed to being built into the wall of a building. They are generally located adjacent to a steam-generating boiler or industrial furnace and the gases are carried to it with ductwork. Today the use of reinforced concrete has almost entirely replaced brick as a structural component in the construction of industrial chimneys. Refractory bricks are often used as a lining, particularly if the type of fuel being burned generates flue gases containing acids. Modern industrial chimneys sometimes consist of a concrete windshield with a number of flues on the inside.

The 300 metre chimney at Sasol Three consists of a 26 metre diameter windshield with four 4.6 metre diameter concrete flues which are lined with refractory bricks built on rings of corbels spaced at 10 metre intervals. The reinforced concrete can be cast by conventional formwork or sliding formwork. The height is to ensure the pollutants are dispersed over a wider area to meet legislative or safety requirements.

Chimney draught or draft

:(See the Industrial chimneys article for more details)

When coal, oil, natural gas, wood or any other fuel is combusted in a stove, oven, fireplace, hot water boiler or industrial furnace, the hot combustion product gases that are formed are called flue gases. Those gases are generally exhausted to the ambient outside air through chimneys or industrial flue gas stacks (sometimes referred to as smokestacks).

The combustion flue gases inside the chimneys or stacks are much hotter than the ambient outside air and therefore less dense than the ambient air. That causes the bottom of the vertical column of hot flue gas to have a lower pressure than the pressure at the bottom of a corresponding column of outside air. That higher pressure outside the chimney is the driving force that moves the required combustion air into the combustion zone and also moves the flue gas up and out of the chimney. That movement or flow of combustion air and flue gas is called "natural draught/draft", "natural ventilation", "chimney effect", or "stack effect". The taller the stack, the more draught or draft is created.

Designing chimneys and stacks to provide the correct amount of natural draught or draft involves a number design factors, many of which require trial-and-error reiterative methods.

As a "first guess" approximation, the following equation can be used to estimate the natural draught/draft flow rate by assuming that the molecular mass (i.e., molecular weight) of the flue gas and the external air are equal and that the frictional pressure and heat losses are negligible:[Natural Ventilation Lecture]

[Q = C\; A\; \sqrt }]

where:
Q	= chimney draught/draft flow rate, m³/s
A	= cross-sectional area of chimney, m² (assuming it has a constant cross-section)
C	= discharge coefficient (usually taken to be from 0.65 to 0.70)
g	= gravitational acceleration, 9.807 m/s²
H	= height of chimney, m
Ti	= average temperature inside the chimney, K
Te	= external air temperature, K

Drawbacks

A characteristic problem of chimneys is they develop deposits of creosote on the walls of the structure when used with wood as a fuel. Some types of wood, such as pine, generate more creosote than others. Deposits of this substance can interfere with the airflow and more importantly, they are flammable and can cause dangerous chimney fires if the deposits ignite in the chimney. Thus, it is recommended — and in some countries even mandatory — that chimneys be inspected annually and cleaned on a regular basis to prevent these problems. The workers who perform this task professionally are called chimney sweeps.

Masonry (brick) chimneys have also proved particularly susceptible to crumbling during earthquakes. Government housing authorities in quake-prone cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles now recommend building new homes with stud-framed chimneys around a metal flue. Bracing or strapping old masonry chimneys has not proved to be very effective in preventing damage or injury from earthquakes. Perhaps predictably, a new industry provides "faux-brick" facades to cover these modern chimney structures.

Other problems include "spalling" brick, in which moisture seeps into the brick and then freezes, cracking and flaking the brick and loosening mortar seals.

Dual-use chimneys

Some very high chimneys are used for carrying antennas of mobile phone services and low power FM/TV-transmitters. Special attention must be paid to possible corrosion problems if these antennas are near the exhaust of the chimney.

In some cases the chimneys of power stations are used also as pylons. However this type of construction is not very common, because of corrosion problems of conductor cables.

Cooling tower used as an industrial chimney

At some power stations, which are equipped with plants for the removal of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, it is possible to use the cooling tower as a chimney. Such cooling towers can be seen in Germany at the Power Station Staudinger Grosskrotzenburg and at the Power Station Rostock. At power stations that are not equipped for removing sulfur dioxide, such usage of cooling towers could result in serious corrosion problems.

Trivia

Tall cylindrical chimneys often survived explosion disasters without damage, which can be seen in pictures of destroyed factories after World War II. This inspired engineers after World War II to build cylindrical TV towers.

Remarkable chimneys

Chimney	Year	Country	Town	Pinnacle height		Remarks
GRES-2 Power Station	1987	Kazachstan	Ekibastusz	420 m	1378 ft	Tallest chimney
Inco Superstack	1971	Canada	Copper Cliff	385 m	1263 ft	Tallest freestanding chimney
Homer City Generating Station	1977	USA	Homer City, Pennsylvania	371 m	1219 ft
Kennecott Smokestack	1974	USA	Tooele, Utah	370.4 m	1246 ft
Mitchell Power Plant	1971	USA	Moundsville, West Virginia	368 m	1207 ft
Trbovlje Chimney	1976	Slovenia	Trbovlje	364 m	1207 ft
Endesa Termic	1974	Spain	La Coruña	356 m	1207 ft
Syrdarya Power Plant	1975	Uzbekhistan	Syrdarya	350 m	1149 ft
Teruel Power Plant	?	Spain	Teruel	343 m	1149 ft
Plomin Power Station	?	Croatia	Plomin	340 m	1149 ft
Power Station Westerholt	1997	Germany	Gelsenkirchen	338 m	1107 ft
Mountaineer Power Plant	1980	USA	New Haven, West Virginia	336 m	1102 ft
TETs5	?	Ukraina	Kharkiv	330 m	1078 ft
Maritza East Power Station	1977- 1980	Bulgaria	Stara Zagora	325 m	1063 ft
Power Station Jaworno	?	Poland	Jaworno	300 m	984 ft
Power Station Belchatow	1979	Poland	Belchatow	300 m	984 ft
Power Station Kozienice	?	Poland	Kozienice	300 m	984 ft
Power Station Warszawa-Kawcyn	?	Poland	Warszawa- Kawcyn	300 m	984 ft
Navajo Generating Station	?	USA	Page, Arizona	236 m	774 ft
Anaconda Smelter Stack	1919	USA	Anaconda, Montana	178 m	585 ft	Tallest freestanding brick chimney

See also

• Cooling tower
• Flue gas stack
• HVAC
• Stack effect

External links

• [Power Station Konakovskaya GRES,] at which chimneys serve as electricity pylons

References

 

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