Intercooler Design Research Articles

Improvement of Air Compressor Cooling with Intercooler Fine Pruning

An intercooler serves as a heat exchanger between the several stages of the working compressor, assisting in the transmission of thermal energy between fluids of varying temperatures. This article is about the experimental analysis of the effectiveness of an intercooler. Multiple variables oversee the performance evaluation under different circumstances. Standard operational values are used to calculate performance evaluation metrics such as total heat transfer coefficient and others. Heat rejection of intercoolers has been enhanced from 61% to 65% by the variation of different fin lengths. Furthermore, the recently added intercooler's isothermal efficiency, which reached an astounding 56.5% significantly, outperformed the earlier unit. This serves to highlight how well the intercooler design was modified. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the Intercooler was assessed considering the circumstances during operation. The intercooler fin is primarily concerned with the performance of the air compressor. This work analyses the many characteristics of fin length, fin number, and fin diameter. When compared to the existing intercooler, this modified intercooler has a high performance

Three-dimensional numerical study of a new intercooler design

Three-dimensional numerical study of a new intercooler design

Study of intercooling for rotating packed bed absorbers in intensified solvent-based CO2 capture process

Rotating packed beds (RPBs) are a compact and potentially more cost-effective alternative to packed beds for application in solvent-based carbon capture process. However, with concentrated monoethanolamine (MEA) (up to 70–80 wt%) as the solvent, there is a question as to whether intercooler is needed for the RPB absorbers and how to design and operate them. This study indicates that the liquid phase temperature could rise significantly and this makes it essential for RPB absorber to have intercoolers. This is further assessed using a validated RPB absorber model implemented in gPROMS ModelBuilder® by evaluating the impact of temperature on absorption performance. Different design options for RPB absorber intercoolers (stationary vs rotary) were introduced and their potential sizes and associated pressure drop were evaluated based on a large scale flue gas benchmark of a 250 MWe Natural Gas Combined Cycle Power Plant. This paper addresses a fundamental question about intercooling in RPB absorber and introduces strategies for the intercooler design.

Experimental Validation of the Aerodynamic Characteristics of an Aero-engine Intercooler

Porous media model computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a valuable approach allowing an entire heat exchanger system, including the interactions with its associated installation ducts, to be studied at an affordable computational effort. Previous work of this kind has concentrated on developing the heat transfer and pressure loss characteristics of the porous medium model. Experimental validation has mainly been based on the measurements at the far field from the porous media exit. Detailed near field data are rare. In this paper, the fluid dynamics characteristics of a tubular heat exchanger concept developed for aero-engine intercooling by the authors are presented. Based on a rapid prototype manufactured design, the detailed flow field in the intercooler system is recorded by particle image velocimetry (PIV) and pressure measurements. First, the computational capability of the porous media to predict the flow distribution within the tubular heat transfer units was confirmed. Second, the measurements confirm that the flow topology within the associated ducts can be described well by porous media CFD modeling. More importantly, the aerodynamic characteristics of a number of critical intercooler design choices have been confirmed, namely, an attached flow in the high velocity regions of the in-flow, particularly in the critical region close to the intersection and the in-flow guide vane, a well-distributed flow in the two tube stacks, and an attached flow in the cross-over duct.

Exergy analysis as a scoping tool for cleaner production of chemicals: a case study of an ethylene production process

High energy consumption is one of the main challenges of the chemical industry. The energy footprint of most processes can, however, diminish through the solutions presented in the current paper, leading to cleaner ways of producing chemicals. Ethylene production process is selected as a case study to demonstrate the approach as it is one of the most energy consuming processes in the chemical industry. The study involves an exergetic diagnosis and does not only find the low-exergy-efficient unit operations, but also proposes tools to improve these units based on their key sources of irreversibility. For the ethylene production process, this is conducted by first splitting the flowsheet into four main functional blocks (namely cracking, compression, refrigeration, and separation and purification) according to their exergy losses. This results in identifying the cracking block as the most inefficient block with more than 45% of total exergy losses and thus the first block to be improved so that overall losses reduce (examples of which include increasing the number of furnace tubes while reducing their lengths). Although the compression block is found to have the lowest contribution to internal exergy losses, the inefficient unit operations such as the water cooler (with an exergy loss of 214 kJ/kg) can still be improved through solutions such as system isolation. The refrigeration block is also shown to have the second highest exergy losses with its ethylene and propylene compressors being the main contributors. Solutions are again provided to improve the block performance with specific focus on intercooler design improvement and system isolation. Finally, exergy losses in the purification and separation block are identified to be mainly due to demethanator, deethanator, and ethylene column where modifications in column design might be helpful as concentration and temperature gradients along the towers are the main sources of exergy losses. The approach used in the current study can also be applied to other chemical processes and the findings suggest that even for a well-developed process technology, there is still opportunity for thermodynamically justifiable energy efficiency improvements. Therefore, it is important for process developers to continuously revisit existing processes, in order to ensure lessons learned in one area can be applied to another one. Using a panel of solutions, which has been constructed from a number of previous case studies helps to make this approach more systematic and user-friendly.

Conceptual design of a two-pass cross-flow aeroengine intercooler

Establishing an optimal intercooled aeroengine constitutes a coupled problem where the conceptual design of the intercooler and the engine has to be considered simultaneously. The heat transfer and pressure loss characteristics will depend on the choice of the intercooler architecture. Hence, to be able to optimize the performance of an intercooled aeroengine, the performance characteristics of a given intercooler architecture has to be known in the parameter range anticipated for the aeroengine optimization. Here, the conceptual design of a tubular two-pass cross-flow intercooler architecture intended for a turbofan aeroengine application is presented. The internal flow is simulated applying a porous media model for the intercooler tubes, whereas the connecting ducts are analyzed with three-dimensional simulations allowing the assessment of a number of design solutions. The external flow is treated with two-dimensional simulations investigating the external pressure loss and heat transfer characteristics of the two elliptical tube stacks. The intercooler performance is then generalized by developing a reduced order correlation covering a parameter range anticipated for a turbofan conceptual design optimization. The paper constitutes a first effort to establish an open literature complete set of correlations for the prediction of aeroengine intercooler performance.

Optimization of Advanced Cycle Gas Turbine Intercooler Structure Based on Genetic Algorithm

As an important component of intercooled cycle gas turbine, intercooler directly affects the ratio power, thermal efficiency and various situation quality of gas turbine system. In this paper, efficiency-heat transfer units were used for the design of intercooler, and the structure parameters were optimized by genetic algorithm. The optimization results show that under the condition of required heat load and allowable pressure drop, the heat exchanger can be guaranteed as the smaller weight and the larger heat transfer efficiency, which can offer reference for the design of the actual intercooler.

Applying heat pipes to a novel concept aero engine: Part 2 – Design of a heat-pipe heat exchanger for an intercooled-recuperated aero engine

AbstractWith the ever-increasing pressure for cleaner and more fuel efficient aero engines, gas turbine manufacturers are faced with a big challenge which they are bound to accept and act upon. The path from current high bypass ratio (BPR) engines to ultra high BPR engines via geared turbo fans will enable a significant reduction in SFC and CO2 emissions. However, in order to reach the emission levels set by the advisory council for aeronautics research in Europe (ACARE), the introduction of more complex cycles that can operate at higher thermal efficiencies is required. Studies have shown that one possibility of achieving higher core efficiencies and hence lower SFC is through the use of an intercooled recuperated (ICR) core. The concept engine, expected to enter into service around 2020, will make use of a conventional fin plate heat exchangers (HEX) for the intercooler and a tube type HEX as the recuperator. Although the introduction of these two components promises a significant reduction in SFC levels, they will give also rise to higher engine complexity, pressure losses and additional weight. Thus, the performance of the engine relies not only on the behaviour of the usual gas turbine components, but will be heavily dependent on the two heat exchangers. This paper seeks to introduce a heat pipe heat exchanger (HPHEX) as alternative designs for the intercooler and the recuperator. The proposed HPHEX designs for application in an ICR aero engine take advantage of the convenience of the geometry of miniature heat pipes to provide a reduction in pressure losses and weight when compared to conventional HEX. The proposed HPHEX intercooler design eliminates any ducting to and from the intercooler, offering up to 32% reduction in hot pressure losses, 34% reduction in cold pressure losses and over 41% reduction in intercooler weight. On the other hand the proposed HPHEX recuperator design can offer 6% improvement in performance, while offering 36% reduction in cold pressure losses, up to 80% reduction in hot pressure losses and over 31% reduction in weight. An ICR using HPHEX for the intercooler and recueprator may offer up to 2·5% increase in net thrust, while still offering 3% reduction in SFC and up to 7·7% reduction in NOX severity parameter, when compared to the ICR using conventional HEX.