Modeling and Simulation of a Piston-Type Work Exchanger for Mechanical Energy Recovery

Abstract

Heat and work are two common forms of energy. Over past decades, thermal energy recovery via heat integration has been very successful in the process industry. Recovery of mechanical energy, however, has not drawn sufficient attention until recently. It is shown that mechanical energy can be recovered systematically through integrating work exchange networks in plants. It is conceived that the pressure-driven work exchange device can be used as a main type of unit in work exchanger networks. In this paper, we introduce a piston-type device to perform work exchange for mechanical energy recovery among pairs of process streams in the gas phase. Computational fluid dynamics-based modeling and simulation is conducted to study the design of the device and its operational behavior under different operating conditions. A case study is illustrated to demonstrate its application potential for mechanical energy recovery.