Exergetic performance comparison of air and hydrogen gas flowing through the annular curved duct

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to parametrically compare the exergetic performance of air and hydrogen gas flow through the curved annular duct. For this purpose, it is assumed that, i) air and hydrogen are considered to be ideal gas, ii) the flow of these gases is steady state and laminar fully developed, ii) these gases have constant physical properties, iii) the channel inner and outer walls are exposed to constant wall boundary condition. Moreover, the following important parameters are taken into consideration: i) aspect ratio (four different values which are 5.50, 3.80, 2.90 and 2.36), ii) environment temperature (ranging from −30 to 30 with 10 °C intervals), iii) Dean number (varying between 24 and 208), and iv) operating pressure (=1 atm). Considering these parameters, exergy destruction and exergy efficiencies are calculated for each aspect ratio. Consequently, exergetic efficiency rises with the increase of Dean number, inner wall temperature, aspect ratio and the decrease of dead state temperature. Also, it is noticed that the gas specie highly affects the volumetric entropy generation rate, exergy destruction rate and exergy efficiency.