Investigation of transient behavior of a novel thermal management controller

Abstract

Conventional waste heat recovery systems have problems of complex distributed configuration, difficult assembling, and bad versatility. Especially, the control strategy, necessary for safety reasons and high energy efficiency, is complex due to the heat source temperature control and thermal management. The concept of “Thermal Management Controller” (TMC) is presented in this work to provide an alternative to solve these problems. An engineering model, based upon lumped-heat capacity and a moving vapor–NCG front, is created to predict the TMC transient behavior. In addition, experimental results are presented and show an excellent agreement with the numerical results, which validates the model. Computation results are used to predict the transient behavior of a TMC, and assess the relative influence of various parameters. In particular, the hot water flow rate has a greater effect on the system response speed than other operational variables. However, the input heat shows great influence on the system start-up speed. Furthermore, some design parameters, such as the working fluid, gas reservoir volume, NCG filled inventory, and heat transfer area density, have a considerable effect on the system transient behavior.