Application of Rheology for Energy Saving Air Conditioning System

Abstract

Surfactant drag reduction is well known as the energy saving technology which is able to cause drastic reduction of pumping power during the fluid transportation. The combination of certain type of cationic surfactant with suitable counter ion is often chosen as the drag reduction agents. Power saving up to 70∼80% is available in straight pipe line system by using surfactant additives. Design problem, in particular, the scale up law in surfactant drag reduction system was solved by using the modified viscoelastic damping factor model along with the measurements of nonlinear viscoelastic properties of surfactant solution. Based on the prediction of the proposed model, it was demonstrated that the surfactant drag reduction technology is promising to construct the large scale energy saving system for air conditioning. Up to now, over 150 sites of building air conditioning had adopted the surfactant drag reduction in Japan, and the practical pumping energy reduction had been reported as 20∼50% compared with the case of no drag-reducing agent.