  One of the main sources of electricity generation is power plants that use
water (steam) to rotate turbines, which drive large electric generators. The
steam can be generated from renewable or non-renewable energy sources, such as
geothermal energy and nuclear fuels. Having an analysis tool for modeling the
performance of such steam power plants can greatly help in reaching optimum
designs, leading to less fuel consumption, reduced pollution, and cheaper
electricity. It is further advantageous if such modeling tool is free to
access, does not require many inputs from the user, and gives results in a very
short time. These remarks establish a motivation for the current study. This
article documents a computer code written in the Python programming language
for numerically analysing the main processes in a steam power cycle with
superheating. The code utilizes built-in thermodynamic properties for water in
the open-source software package "Cantera". A validation case with a
benchmarking example in the literature using an independent source of water
properties suggests that the developed code is correct. The code can be viewed
as an extension to the Python examples for thermodynamic and power generation
applications. Cantera can handle both subcritical and supercritical types of
superheating. In the subcritical superheating, the steam absolute pressure does
not exceed 220.9 bar. In the supercritical superheating, water becomes in a
special condition called supercritical fluid, with absolute pressures above
220.9 bar.
