A novel revolving vane compressor with a fixed-vane

Abstract

This paper presents design improvements of a Revolving Vane (RV) compressor which significantly reduce the frictional losses. The original RV compressor has a vane that swivels during the operation. Though in general, the frictional losses of the RV compressor are significantly lower than most currently available rotary compressors, this swivel vane design has a disadvantage of relatively high vane side friction loss. The latter is caused by a high vane-side and slot contact force due to a high gas pressure differential force across the vane. In this paper, a new design concept has been introduced to totally eliminate the vane side friction loss caused by the gas pressure differential force across the vane. This is achieved by rigidly fixes the vane onto the rotor or the cylinder. This new design yielded two possible variants, each reduces the frictional losses by 18% and 41% and improves the mechanical efficiency from 93% to 94% and 96% respectively. In this paper, details analysis on the new design that leads to the improvement in performance are presented and shown. The analysis also reveals that the design with the highest mechanical efficiency comes with a small price of a higher instantaneous peak torque requirement.