Abstract
A study is presented on a new rotational boiler design which has improved passive dynamic response and two-phase flow stability characteristics. A survey of small boiler manufacturers in the United States indicated that currently available designs are based on steady-state operating requirements rather than for dynamic performance. Recent work by EPA and ERDA which addressed boiler designs for mobile automotive Rankine cycle power systems showed that boilers of a monotube or multipass tube configuration design could be developed which were physically compact, but still were subject to the two-phase flow instability problem when coupled within an operating power system. The objectives of this work were to evaluate alternative boiler configurations which would improve boiler dynamic response and also have good two-phase liquid-vapor interface flow stability. The major physical design limitation of any boiler is the small external hot gas heat transfer coefficient. Such a low coefficient requires considerable design enhancements to increase the rate of energy transfer to the circulation system fluid. The rotational boiler is a physical design configuration which addresses this problem. The results of an analytic study using several mathematical model formulations showed that a rotational boiler could have a passive response time constant which was approximately one-half the magnitude for an equivalent single pass monotube boiler. An experimental prototype rotational boiler was designed, manufactured and tested, with the experimental results confirming that the experimental passive response time constants were comparable to the estimates from the analytic models. The experimental boiler operating in two-phase flow was found to be stable and responsive to external inputs. A rotational boiler configuration is a good alternative design configuration for small compact vapor generator designs based on fast transient passive response and two-phase flow stability.
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