Investigation of Methanol Based Air-Air Thermosyphon Heat Exchangers

Author(s):  
Bharath Viswanath Ravi ◽  
Mukilan Sebastiraj Michael ◽  
S. Audithya Krishna ◽  
Lakshmanan Arunachalam ◽  
Suresh Mariappan

Thermosyphons are self-actuated heat transport systems in which the circulation of the working fluid is brought about by a combination of gravity and buoyant forces. In the recent years, thermosyphons have been considered for widely diverse heat recovery applications, especially in HVAC systems. In this work, a systematic approach for design and analysis of finned air-air thermosyphon heat exchanger system based on effectiveness-NTU method is presented. Furthermore, the effect of mass flow ratio of the hot and cold air stream, temperature difference between the hot and cold air streams, transverse tube spacing, fin spacing and length of the thermosyphon on the effectiveness of the system is predicted by numerical simulation. In addition, the thermal performance of unfinned thermosyphon heat exchanger system has also been investigated experimentally.

Author(s):  
Geir Skaugen ◽  
Harald T. Walnum ◽  
Brede A. L. Hagen ◽  
Daniel P. Clos ◽  
Marit J. Mazzetti ◽  
...  

This paper describes design and optimization of a Waste Heat Recovery Unit (WHRU) for a power cycle which uses CO2 as a working fluid. This system is designed for offshore installation to increase gas turbine efficiency by recovering waste heat from the exhaust for production of additional power. Due to severe constraints on weight and space in an offshore setting, it is essential to reduce size and weight of the equipment to a minimum. Process simulations are performed to optimize the geometry of the WHRU using different objective functions and thermal-hydraulic models. The underlying heat exchanger model used in the simulations is an in-house model that includes the calculation of weight and volume for frame and structure for the casing in addition to the thermal-hydraulic performance of the heat exchanger core. The results show that the for a set of given process constraints, optimization with respect to minimum total weight or minimum core weight shown similar results for the total installed weight, although the design of heat exchanger differs. The applied method also shows how the WHRU geometry can be optimized for different material combinations.


Author(s):  
Govinda Mahajan ◽  
Heejin Cho ◽  
Scott M. Thompson ◽  
Harrison Rupp ◽  
Kevin Muse

Oscillating heat pipes (OHPs) were experimentally assessed as a passive-type heat transfer device for air-to-air heat exchange in a typical Heating Ventilation & Air conditioning system (HVAC) with adjacent air streams at different temperatures. The objective is to utilize, otherwise wasted thermal energy to pre-heat or pre-cool air in order to reduce the payload on HVAC systems, thus reducing energy consumption. OHPs can achieve effective thermal conductivities on-the-order of 10,000 W/m-K via no internal wicking structure and hence can perform aforementioned heat transfer task while providing an aerodynamic form factor. A unique working fluid with limited research inside OHPs, but with properties desirable for low grade heat fluxes, i.e. n-pentane with 70 % fill ratio, was chosen as the working fluid to achieve maximum heat transfer. Aerodynamic performance, in terms of pressure drop, was evaluated and juxtaposed with heat transfer gain/loss. The OHP thermal performance and total heat transfer for hot-environment HVAC operation was benchmarked with an empty/evacuated OHP with same overall dimensions. Results indicate that the current, atypically-long OHP is fully-capable of operating in the air-to-air convection mode for waste heat recovery for typical HVAC operating conditions. Since the OHP is passive, cost effective, and relatively aerodynamic (no fins were used), the potential cost savings for its integration into HVAC systems can be significant.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 00012
Author(s):  
Anna Bryszewska-Mazurek ◽  
Wojciech Mazurek

An air-to-air heat pipe heat exchanger has been designed, constructed and tested. Gravity-assisted wickless heat pipes (thermosiphons) were used to transfer heat from one air stream to another air stream, with a low temperature difference. A thermosiphon heat exchanger has its evaporation zone below the condensation zone. Heat pipes allow keeping a more uniform temperature in the heat transfer area. The heat exchanger consists of 20 copper tubes with circular copper fins on their outer surface. The tubes were arranged in a row and the air passed across the pipes. R245fa was used as a working fluid in the thermosiphons. Each heat pipe had a 40 cm evaporation section, a 20 cm adiabatic section and a 40 cm condensation section. The thermosiphon heat exchanger has been tested in different conditions of air stream parameters (flows, temperatures and humidity). The air face velocity ranged from 1,0 m/s to 4,0 m/s. The maximum thermal efficiency of the thermosiphon heat exchanger was between 26÷40%, depending on the air velocity. The freezing of moisture from indoor air was observed when the cold air temperature was below - 13°C.


Author(s):  
Carsten Trapp ◽  
Piero Colonna

This paper presents an analysis about recovering low-grade thermal energy from a precombustion CO2 capture process as part of an integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) power plant by means of organic rankine cycle (ORC) turbogenerators. The distinguishing feature of this system is the thermal energy source that is a syngas-water mixture, which is cooled from a temperature of approximately 140 °C, and partly condenses due to the heat transfer to the ORC primary heat exchanger. This study explores various types of ORC power systems for this application. The performance of commercially available ORC units is used as a benchmark and compared to the performance of two types of tailor-designed ORC power plants. The working fluid has a major influence on system performance and other technical and economic factors. The effect of selecting a fluid from the hydrocarbon and refrigerant families are therefore investigated, targeting the maximum net power output. In addition to pure fluids, two-component mixtures are also considered. The use of mixtures as working fluids in subcritical heat-recovery ORC systems allows for a better match of the temperature profiles in the primary heat exchanger and the condenser due to the temperature glide associated with phase-transition, leading to lower irreversibilities within the heat exchanging equipment. In order to further improve the thermal coupling between the cooling heat source and the heating of the working fluid, the supercritical cycle configuration is also studied. The performance of the three categories of systems, depending on working fluid and cycle configuration, i.e., systems based on (i) commercially available units, (ii) tailor-designed subcritical cycle, (iii) tailor-designed supercritical cycle, are analyzed in terms of net power output, second law efficiency, and component-based exergy efficiencies. The analysis shows that an improvement of 38.0% in terms of net power output compared to the benchmark system can be achieved by an optimized supercritical ORC power plant using an R134a/R236fa mixture as the working fluid. It is estimated that the total power consumption of the considered exemplary CO2 capture plant can be reduced by approximately 10% with the optimal ORC system. In this study, particular attention is focused on the semi-empirical optimization approach, in order to avoid unnecessary computations, and general guidelines are provided.


2018 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 02056
Author(s):  
Imansyah Ibnu Hakim ◽  
Nandy Putra ◽  
Adam Prihananda Marda ◽  
Muhammad Alvin Alvaro ◽  
Adi Winarta

Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system in hospital's clean room is required to continue working for 24 hours to provide the ideal air quality for the activities therein. This causes a huge amount of energy consumption in hospital buildings itself. This study aims to determine the effectiveness and heat recovery of Heat Pipe Heat Exchanger (HPHE). The HPHE used in this study consisted of 12 heat pipes per module, in which the line was arranged staggered. The number of the module is varied 3 times, which are 1, 2, and 3 modules. The heat pipe is made of copper and contains working fluid in the form of water with 50% filling ratio. HPHE equipped with fins to expand the contact surface with airflow. Each variation of the number of modules is tested on the HVAC system model of the clean room. In the evaporator inlet, air flowing to the variation of temperature: 28, 30, 35, and 40°C, and at speeds of 1.5, 2.0, 2.5 m/s. The use of HPHE can recover heat as much as 1654.72 kJ/h. The highest effectiveness of this HPHE is 48.729%, was obtained when using three modules, air temperature inlet evaporator (Te,i) = 35°C, and airspeed of inlet 1.5 m/s.


Author(s):  
Derek Young ◽  
Spencer C. Gibson ◽  
Todd M. Bandhauer

Abstract Low grade waste heat recovery presents an opportunity to utilize typically wasted energy to reduce overall energy consumption and improve system efficiencies. In this work, the technoeconomic performance of a turbocompression cooling system (TCCS) driven by low grade waste heat in the engine coolant of a large marine diesel generator set is investigated. Five different working fluids were examined to better understand the effects of fluid characteristics on system performance: R134a, R245fa, R1234ze(E), R152a, and R600a. A coupled thermodynamic, heat exchanger, and economic simulation was developed to calculate the simple payback period of the waste heat recovery system, which was minimized using a search and find optimization routine with heat exchanger effectiveness as the optimization parameter. A sensitivity study was performed to understand which heat exchanger effectiveness had the largest impact on payback period. Of the five working fluids examined, a TCCS with R152a as the working fluid had the lowest payback period of 1.46 years with an initial investment of $181,846. The R152a system was most sensitive to the two-phase region of the power cycle condenser. The R1234ze(E) system provided the largest return on investment over a ten year lifetime of $1,399,666.


2019 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-60
Author(s):  
Juraj Kabát ◽  
Štefan Gužela ◽  
Peter Peciar

AbstractThe aim of this work is to investigate a heat performance of a Multi-Layered Oscillating Heat Pipes Heat Exchanger (ML-OHPHE) for the application of heat recovery in heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems (HVAC systems). The heat exchanger is investigated experimentally under different conditions of heat loads and filling ratios. The experimental data results are compared to the data obtained from Honeywell’s UniSim® Design Suite software. In the end the NTU analysis of the ML-OHPHE is done and a value of overall heat transfer coefficient is calculated. The results of the experiments indicate that the ML-OHPHE could serve as a completely passive heat transfer device in the application of heat recovery in HVAC systems.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (14) ◽  
pp. 4252
Author(s):  
Cheng-Yen Chang ◽  
Wei-Hsin Chen ◽  
Lip Huat Saw ◽  
Arjay Avilla Arpia ◽  
Manuel Carrera Uribe

The printed circuit heat exchanger (PCHE) is a promising waste heat recovery technology to improve energy efficiency. The current investigation presents the experimental results on the thermal performance of a novel PCHE for low-temperature waste heat recovery. The novel PCHE was manufactured using precision machining and diffusion bonding. The thermal performances, such as effectiveness and NTU values at different temperatures, are evaluated, and water is used as a working fluid. The experimental results indicate that the PCHE’s effectiveness is around 0.979 for an inlet flow temperature of 95 °C. The predominant factors affecting the thermal performance of the PCHE are the inlet flow temperature and the flow rate of the working fluid. In addition, a comparison of the experimental results and the literature shows that the effectiveness of the PCHE is better than the others, which have fewer layers of PCHE fins.


Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai-Shing Yang ◽  
Ming-Yean Jiang ◽  
Chih-Yung Tseng ◽  
Shih-Kuo Wu ◽  
Jin-Cherng Shyu

In this study, the vertically-oriented pulsating heat pipe (PHP) heat exchangers charged with either water or HFE-7000 in a filling ratio of 35% or 50% were fabricated to exchange the thermal energy between two air streams in a parallel-flow arrangement. Both the effectiveness of the heat exchangers and the thermal resistance of PHP with a size of 132 × 44 × 200 mm, at a specific evaporator temperature ranging from 55 to 100 °C and a specific airflow velocity ranging from 0.5 to 2.0 m/s were estimated. The results show that the heat pipe charged with HFE-7000 in either filling ratio is likely to function as an interconnected array of thermosiphon under all tested conditions because of the unfavorable tube inner diameter, whereas the water-charged PHP possibly creates the pulsating movement of the liquid and vapor slugs once the evaporator temperature is high enough, especially in a filling ratio of 50%. The degradation in the thermal performance of the HFE-7000-charged PHP heat exchanger resulted from the non-condensable gas in the tube became diminished as the evaporator temperature was increased. By examining the effectiveness of the present heat exchangers, it is suggested that water is a suitable working fluid while employing the PHP heat exchanger at an evaporator temperature higher than 70 °C. On the other hand, HFE-7000 is applicable to the PHP used at an evaporator temperature lower than 70 °C.


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