What Is a Boiler?

A boiler is a box formed by tubes that uses fire inside that box to heat water into steam.
Surrounding those tubes and completely encasing the tube walls and the firebox area are the
bril (brick, refractory, insulation, and lagging) materials. The number and size of the tubes, the
type of fuel, and the overall physical dimensions of the boiler will all vary depending on what
the boiler is designed to produce (water, steam, or heat) and the industry it is intended to serve
(e.g., utility, industrial, medical).

Many components make up or act as a support system for the boiler to meet its designed
steam or heat requirements. There are the tubes that carry the water and/or steam throughout
the system; soot blowers that keep the unit free of fly ash or dust by blowing steam water or air
into the boiler; burners that burn the fuel (oil, gas, coal, refuse); economizers that recover heat
from the exit gas and pre-heat the water used for making steam; and many more such systems,
including brick, refractory, insulation, and lagging, which help the steam-generating boiler be
energy and thermally efficient.

Who Invented the Boiler?

The steam-generating boilers roots go back to the late 1700s and early 1800s with the
development of the kettle-type boiler, which simply boiled water into steam. The water was
placed above a fire box and then boiled into steam. It wasnt until around 1867, with the
development of the convection boiler, that the steam-generating industry began.

It may be debated who developed the first steam-generating boiler; however, most will agree
that George Babcock and Steven Wilcox were two of the founding fathers of the steam-
generating boiler. They were the first to patent their boiler design, which used tubes inside a
firebrick-walled structure to generate steam, in 1867, and they formed Babcock & Wilcox
Company in New York City in 1891. Their first boilers were quite small, used lump coal, fired by
hand, and operated at a very low rate of heat input. The solid firebrick walls that formed the
enclosure for the unit were necessary because they helped the combustion process by
reradiating heat back into the furnace area.

The Stirling Boiler Company, owned by O.C. Barber and named for the street (Stirling Avenue)
the facility was on in Barberton, Ohio, also began making boilers in 1891. Their eighth Stirling
boiler design was called the H-type boiler (h being the eighth letter in the alphabet) and had a
brick setting design. The Stirling boiler was much larger than the Babcock & Wilcox boiler and
used three drums to help circulate the water and steam flow throughout the boiler.

In 1907, the Stirling Boiler Company merged with the Babcock & Wilcox Company. They
renamed their boiler the H-type Stirling, and it became one of best-selling boilers of its time,
probably because of its ability to produce up to 50,000 pounds of steam per hour.

However, they were not the only boiler manufacturers during the late 1800s. The Grieve Grate
Company and the American Stoker Company were also making boilers of similar all-brick-wall
design. They both used a traveling or screw-type grate at the bottom of the boiler to transport
the fuel (lump coal) across the inside of the boiler. As the fuel traveled across the inside of the
boiler, it was burned and the ash or un-burned fuel would drop into a hopper. These two
companies later formed the Combustion Engineering
Company in 1912. The new Combustion Engineering Company offered their version of the
Grieve and American Stoker boilers and called it the Type E stoker boiler.

https://insulation.org/io/articles/the-history-of-the-steam-generating-boiler-and-industry/

1 Working Principle of Boiler

A boiler is a closed vessel in which water or other fluid is heated. The fluid does not necessarily
boil. (In North America the term "furnace" is normally used if the purpose is not actually to boil
the fluid.) The heated or vaporized fluid exits the boiler for use in various processes or heating
applications, including central heating, boiler-based power generation, cooking, and sanitation.
The basic working principle of boiler is very very simple and easy to understand. The boiler is
essentially a closed vessel inside which water is stored. Fuel (generally coal) is bunt in a furnace
and hot gasses are produced. These hot gasses come in contact with water vessel where the
heat of these hot gases transfer to the water and consequently steam is produced in the boiler.
Then this steam is piped to the turbine of thermal power plant. There are many different types
of boiler utilized for different purposes like running a production unit, sanitizing some area,
sterilizing equipment, to warm up the surroundings etc.
http://mvn.edu.in/mvnlms/mod/book/view.php?id=1241