Abstract
As the whole society attaches great importance to the safety of food and medicine, and hydrogen fuel cell and new energy vehicle industry rises suddenly, people’s requirements for clean compressed air is more and more urgent. Water-lubricated single screw compressor is an ideal choice for providing clean air because of the advantages of balanced force, a long service life, and high efficiency, and the influencing factors of its performance have received more and more attention. This study established a mathematical model of the working process of a water-lubricated single-screw air compressor to study the relationship between its performance and the water injection atomization. The model considered leakage and heat transfer between water and moist air and analysed the influences of droplet diameter and rotation speed on compressor performance. The results showed that water injection atomization can effectively reduce the discharge temperature, make the compression process of the compressor tend to isothermal compression. Under rated conditions, a reduction in the droplet diameter from 0.25 mm to 0.15 mm reduced the discharge temperature of the compressor, improved the volume efficiency, and improved the adiabatic efficiency by 31 K, 2.6%, and 8.2%, respectively.
Highlights
There have in recent years been increasingly urgent requirements for improved quality of compressed air, and in particular, oil-free clean air
The water-lubricated single screw air compressor relies on water injection to replace oil injection and plays the role of cooling, sealing, lubrication and noise reduction for the compressed air, so that the compressor can operate in an isothermal compression process and effectively reduce the energy consumption of the machine [1]
Under a constant water injection flow rate, the heat transfer area could be effectively increased by reducing the diameter of the atomized droplet, resulting in an increase in heat transfer
Summary
There have in recent years been increasingly urgent requirements for improved quality of compressed air, and in particular, oil-free clean air. Water lubricated single screw air compressor is an efficient means to produce pure oil-free compressed air. The research on the water lubricated compressor is mainly focused on the twin screw compressor [2,3,4], and there have been few studies on the performance of water-lubricated single-screw air compressors. Water injection atomization is an important parameter affecting water lubricated single screw air compressor. The present study established a thermodynamic model to represent the working process of the water-lubricated single-screw air compressor to examine the influences of the diameter of the atomized droplets injected into the compressor and the rotation speed on the performance of the compressor. The results of the present study can provide theoretical guidance for the design and optimization of a water-lubricated single-screw air compressor
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