Experimental study of heat transfer enhancement in liquid piston compressor using aqueous foam

Abstract

Efficiency of gas compression can be significantly improved by achieving isothermal compression. A high heat transfer rate in the compression chamber is desired to achieve the isothermal compression process. A large surface area and a high heat transfer coefficient of aqueous foam can be used to achieve a significantly high heat transfer rate in the compression chamber. In this study, a novel heat transfer enhancement technique using aqueous foam is investigated in a compressor for achieving near-isothermal compression. Experiments are performed with the use of aqueous foam generated inside a liquid piston compressor. The volume of aqueous foam in the compression chamber, the air flow rate for foam generation, and various foam generator designs are considered in this parametric investigation. It is observed that the use of aqueous foam in the compression chamber is highly effective in reducing air temperature during the compression process. A higher volume of aqueous foam in the compression chamber leads to a significant increment in isothermal efficiency, however, with higher variability. The higher variability in efficiency is due to the higher cyclic variation of the temperature profiles during compression. A compression chamber completely filled with aqueous foam shows a 4–8% improvement in the efficiency for a compression ratio of 2.5. Moreover, several foam generator designs were tested to identify if there is any dependency of cyclic variability on foam generator design parameters. The results show some promise on optimizing the design to reduce the variability. Overall, the heat transfer enhancement using aqueous foam is effective in achieving an isothermal efficiency up to 92% compared to 86% for the no-foam case in a liquid piston compressor.