Thermal performance of an ice storage device for cooling compressed mine air in high-temperature mine refuge chambers

Abstract

Power outages and the risk of explosion in disaster areas make the temperature control in hot mine refuge chambers become extremely challenging. In this article, an ice storage cooling mine compressed air device with a volume of 1 m3 was newly developed for high-temperature mine refuge chambers. Both the ice storage performance and the compressed air cooling performance of the device were tested in a systematic manner. A full-size numerical model was established and validated against experimental data. The effects of the heat exchange tubes number, inlet air velocity and inlet air temperature on its thermal performance were analyzed in detail. Results indicate that: (i) the ice storage function is completed within 60 h with the ice being cooled to below −15 °C. (ii) When the number of heat exchange tubes is 18, the device achieves the best thermal performance with an ice melting rate of 85.02 % within 96 h, and the average outlet temperature could be cooled to approximately 20 °C. (iii) increasing the inlet air temperature from 30 to 34 °C could increase the ice melting rate by 4.59 %, and increasing the inlet air velocity from 5 to 15 m/s could increase the ice melting rate by 16.36 %. the rational allocation of cold storage capacity by mixing air supply is the key to improving the utilization rate of the cold capacity and prolonging the effective temperature control time of the refuge chamber.