Particularity of Heat Exchange of Twisted Heat Exchangers in External Flow

Perfecting the existing technologies and developing new ones require to rethink the processes in order to obtain qualitatively new results. Widespread use of cryogenic engineering in the chemical industry and medicine calls for a thorough analysis of both the efficiency of thermodynamic cycles and the hardware design of appropriate equipment. The power necessary to obtain low working medium temperatures is distributed between the cooling of the object and the losses in the various elements of the cryogenic setup. One of the best ways to increase the efficiency of the setup is to use the cold energy recovery. This is done by using various designs of recuperative heat exchangers, such as twisted heat exchangers. Existing methods of calculating the parameters of power equipment are based on empirical dependencies, which require some justification and clarification in order to be used for calculating cryogenic equipment parameters. The article describes the experimental setup, presents the research methods applied and analyses the results of the study on convective heat transfer in external flow past the tubular surface of the twisted heat exchanger. The obtained results for the laminar gas flow mode at Re < 2300 allowed determining the length of the initial heat section depending on the regime parameters of the contact phases and the geometric specifications of the twisted heat exchanger. The obtained dependence will make it possible to refine the method of calculating the parameters of the twisted heat exchanger in the annular channel.

The Effect of Dynamic Cold Storage Packed Bed on Liquid Air Energy Storage in an Experiment Scale

Liquid air energy storage (LAES) is one of the most promising large-scale energy storage technologies for the decarburization of networks. When electricity is needed, the liquid air is utilized to generate electricity through expansion, while the cold energy from liquid air evaporation is stored and recovered in the air liquefaction process. The packed bed filled with rocks/pebbles for cold storage is more suitable for real-world application in the near future compared to the fluids for cold storage. A standalone LAES system with packed bed energy storage is proposed in our previous work. However, the utilization of pressurized air for heat transfer fluid in the cold storage packed bed (CSPB) is confusing, and the effect of the CSPB on the system level should be further discussed. To address these issues, the dynamic performance of the CSPB is analyzed with the physical properties of the selected cold storage materials characterized. The system simulation is conducted in an experiment scale with and without considering the exergy loss of the CSPB for comparison. The simulation results show that the proposed LAES system has an ideal round trip efficiency (RTE) of 39.38–52.91%. With the consideration of exergy destruction of the CSPB, the RTE decreases by 19.91%. Furthermore, increasing the cold storage pressure reasonably is beneficial to the exergy efficiency of the CSPB, whether it is non-supercritical (0.1 MPa–3 MPa) or supercritical (4 MPa–9 MPa) air. These findings will give guidance and prediction to the experiments of the LAES and finally promote the development of the industrial application.

Operation analysis of C3-MR process cold box by grey system theory

In this paper, the problems of high refrigerant line differential pressure and uneven distribution of cold energy in cold box regulation under C3-MR process are studied. Five reasons are predicted by engineering performance. Using gas chromatography experiment and grey system pure mathematics analysis, it is determined that the main causes of the problem are unreasonable distribution ratio of each group of mixed refrigerants and disordered latent heat of vaporization of refrigerants. Furthermore, the grey system model is used to study: 1. grey relation analysis model shows that the correlation degree of T3 temperature measuring point is 0.8552, which is the only main factor. The abnormal working condition is determined by the project to be caused by incorrect proportion of N2 components. 2. According to GM(1,N) model, the driving term of T3 temperature measuring point is 3.8304, which needs to be supplemented with N2 component to eliminate the problem. 3. After adding N2 to 10% (mol component), abnormal working conditions disappeared. The GM(1,N) model is used again to verify that the difference of driving results is small, the average relative error is 24.91%, and the accuracy of the model is in compliance.