Abstract
The growing global demand for energy and the costly taxes on electric energy demonstrate the importance of seeking new techniques to improve energy efficiency in industrial facilities. Refrigeration units demand a large amount of electricity due to the high power needs of the components of the system. One strategy to reduce the electric energy consumption in these facilities is pressure condensation control. The objective here was to develop a logical control model where the physical quantities in the thermodynamic process can be monitored and used to determine the optimum point of the condensation pressure and the mass flow rate of the air in the evaporative condenser. The algorithm developed was validated through experiments and was posteriorly implemented in an ammonia industrial system of refrigeration over a period of sixteen months (480 days). The results showed that the operation of the evaporative condenser with a controlled air mass flow rate by logical modeling achieved a reduction of 7.5% in the consumption of electric energy, leading to a significant reduction in the operational cost of the refrigeration plant.
Highlights
The results showed that it is not necessarily beneficial for the refrigeration system to maximally reduce the magnitude of condensation pressure
The results showed that when the refrigeration system operated with a reduced mass flow rate of the air in the evaporative condenser (EC), the decrease in the electric energy consumption by EC could reach a magnitude of 86.89%
The present study showed how dynamic control modeling of an evaporative condenser, using a floating operation of the condensation pressure, can rationalize the consumed electric energy in an industrial vapor compression refrigeration system
Summary
An efficient way to reduce electric energy consumption in a refrigeration system is to modify the operation condensation pressure (OCP) Another important alternative is the use of mathematical and computational modeling to simulate various conditions. The use of different strategies to control the drive of compressors and fans in refrigeration systems was shown to be an important strategy to reduce electric energy consumption in comparison with the traditional drive system of this equipment. This behavior has previously been demonstrated in the literature [8,9,10,11,12]. The mass flow rate of the air in the evaporative condenser is controlled to modify the condensation pressure to remain within magnitudes that result in less electricity demand
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