Abstract
Reducing carbon emissions is an urgent problem around the world while facing the energy and environmental crises. Whatever progress has been made in renewable energy research, efforts made to energy-saving technology is always necessary. The energy consumption from fluid power systems of industrial processes is considerable, especially for pneumatic systems. A novel isothermal compression method was proposed to lower the energy consumption of compressors. A porous medium was introduced to compose an isothermal piston. The porous medium was located beneath a conventional piston, and gradually immerged into the liquid during compression. The compression heat was absorbed by the porous medium, and finally conducted with the liquid at the chamber bottom. The heat transfer can be significantly enhanced due to the large surface area of the porous medium. As the liquid has a large heat capacity, the liquid temperature can maintain constant through circulation outside. This create near-isothermal compression, which minimizes energy loss in the form of heat, which cannot be recovered. There will be mass loss of the air due to dissolution and leakage. Therefore, the dissolution and leakage amount of gas are compensated for in this method. Gas is dissolved into liquid with the pressure increasing, which leads to mass loss of the gas. With a pressure ratio of 4:1 and a rotational speed of 100 rpm, the isothermal piston decreased the energy consumption by 45% over the conventional reciprocation piston. This gain was accomplished by increasing the heat transfer during the gas compression by increasing the surface area to volume ratio in the compression chamber. Frictional forces between the porous medium and liquid was presented. Work to overcome the frictional forces is negligible (0.21% of the total compression work) under the current operating condition.
Highlights
With the acceleration of industrialization, man’s demand for energy has increased, and serious environmental pollution and ecological destruction problems have been brought along with it such as global environmental problems caused by coal and petroleum-based fossil energy including acid rain, ozone layer destruction, haze weather, and so on
This paper proposes a novel concept to achieve isothermal compression: isothermal piston
To verify the heat transfer effect of the isothermal piston, the pressure drop caused by the mass loss of air should be compensated, which is caused by dissolution and leakage in the compression process
Summary
With the acceleration of industrialization, man’s demand for energy has increased, and serious environmental pollution and ecological destruction problems have been brought along with it such as global environmental problems caused by coal and petroleum-based fossil energy including acid rain, ozone layer destruction, haze weather, and so on. These are the consequences of increased carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. Industrial energy consumption is relatively high, energy efficiency is relatively low, and there is still much room for energy saving potentials [3]. The second is Entropy 2020, 22, 1015; doi:10.3390/e22091015 www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy
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