Abstract
Air compressor costs approximate 10%–40% of total power in manufacturing industries. And its efficiency is less than 50%. Methods for reducing compression power have been explored extensively. Most of the methods focus on cooling compressed air to achieve isothermal compression. Recently, water spray cooling has become increasingly popular for its high specific heat, small spray diameter and large evaporation heat. In this study, compression system with water spray is compared with that without water spray. The experimental results show that increasing flow rate of water spray can enhance cooling effect and the generated pressure of water spray has little influence on cooling effect. Water spray method has a potential in reducing compression power by 23%. This study provides guidance for the compressor design and basic experiment data for further research.
Highlights
Compressed air has been widely used in engineering, such as automobile manufacturing, electronics, semiconductor manufacturing, manufacturing automation, packaging automation, etc
The key technology to achieve isothermal compression is to reduce the temperature of the compressed air by cooling
The weighing method is adopted for measuring the spray nozzle flow rate
Summary
Compressed air has been widely used in engineering, such as automobile manufacturing, electronics, semiconductor manufacturing, manufacturing automation, packaging automation, etc. Air compressor is the primary energy-consuming equipment which costs approximate 10%–40% of total power in manufacturing industries [1]. The efficient method of compression is explored extensively under the trends of conserving energy, reducing emissions and protecting the environment. The theoretical calculation results show that the adiabatic compression power is 10%–30% more than that of isothermal compression when the compression ratio is 2–8 [2]. The key technology to achieve isothermal compression is to reduce the temperature of the compressed air by cooling
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