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3 authors:
Mohammad O. Hamdan
Basel Alsayyed
7 PUBLICATIONS 5 CITATIONS
SEE PROFILE
SEE PROFILE
Emad Elnajjar
United Arab Emirates University
31 PUBLICATIONS 88 CITATIONS
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ORIGINAL
Greek symbols
e Cold mass fraction e = mc/min
h Tangential coordinate
/ Tangent nozzle orientation angle
Subscripts
HP Heat pump
R
Refrigerator
1 Introduction
The vortex tube is a thermal static tube that separates
compressed gas flow to two streams; one stream colder
than the inlet flow while the other stream is hotter than the
inlet flow. The vortex tube does not have any moving parts
and the separation occurs due to vortex flow generation
without requiring any external mechanical work or heat
transfer. The vortex tube was first discovered by Ranque
[1, 2] who was granted a French patent for the device in
1932, and a United States patent in 1934. Ranque
encountered the vortex tube phenomenon while he was
experimentally working with vortex tube pump in 1928. In
1945, Rudolf Hilsch [3] conducted an experiment on vortex
tube that focused on the thermal performance with different
inlet pressure and different geometrical parameters.
In the recent years it was known that vortex tube is a low
cost and an effective solution for many spot cooling
problems. The separation mechanism inside the vortex tube
remains until today not completely understood [4]. The
ability to obtain either hot or cold flow streams using
compressed gas, allowed the use of vortex tube in many
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2 Experimental setup
A two-dimensional cross section of used vortex tube is
shown in Fig. 1a. Room temperature compressed air is used
as working fluid at different inlet pressure values. The
compressed air enters in the middle of the vortex tube to a
chamber that distributes the air into multiple inlet nozzles
that promote vortex flow generation within the vortex generator, Fig. 1b. The vortex flow get separated to two outlets
where hot air leaves from the outer perimeter of the vortex
while cold air leaves from the center of vortex at the opposite
direction as shown in Fig. 1a. A vortex stopper shown in
Fig. 1c is used to stop the flow from rotating while leaving
the hot side of the vortex tube. The detail design and
dimension of the vortex generator is shown in Table 1. The
3 Mathematical analysis
The efficiency of a refrigerator is expressed in terms of the
coefficient of performance (COP) which is expressed as
follow, [26]:
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Jet
width
Jet cavity
depth
Jet cavity
diameter
Cold outlet
diameter
h0
D0
0.863
2.33
0.863
14.48
5.430
5.416
7.236
COP
Desired output
Required input
COPR
1
2
COPHP
COPHP
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3
4
The behavior of the vortex tube when cold and hot outlets
are brought to the same outlet pressure is shown Fig. 3
which shows that the cold and hot outlet temperature difference with respect to the inlet temperature versus the cold
mass fraction (e). The present experimental data, Fig. 3a,
shows a good qualitative agreement with earlier published
data [3, 6, 11] considering the geometry and the inlet
conditions differences. As expected and reported in literature, there is a non-monotonic relation between outlets
temperature difference and cold mass fraction indicating
that there is an optimum cold mass fraction for maximum
hot temperature and minimum cold temperature. As shown
if Fig. 3a, the optimum temperature at the cold outlet is
(DTc = -14.7 C at e = 0.19) and at the hot outlet is
(DTh = -17.4 C at e = 0.73) which shows that optimum
cold and hot temperature does not occur at the same cold
mass fraction. As shown in Fig. 3b, the maximum COP of
cooling is achieved at wide mass fraction range 0.380.73
which is higher than the coldest point which occur at
e = 0.19. The relation between COP of cooling versus cold
mass fraction and cold outlet temperature is presented in
Eqs. (1) and (2). The mass fraction where maximum COPR
is reached for cold outlet is different than the mass fraction
where coldest temperature is attained and this is expected
since COPR depends on mass fraction and cold outlet
temperature. Correspondingly, the interaction between
temperature difference and mass flow rate is used to calculate the COP which causes the optimum for temperature
difference to be different from the one for the COP.
The effect of inlet pressure on outlet temperature and
COP are shown in Fig. 4a, b, respectively. The coldest and
hottest temperatures increase as inlet pressure increases
Fig. 3 The cold mass fraction effect on the a cold/hot outlets flow
and b COP for cold/hot outlets flow
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(a)
(b)
Fig. 6 The effect of the location of the swirl stopper at 4 bar inlet
pressure and 26 C inlet temperature on the a cold/hot outlets flow
and b maximum COP
Fig. 7 The effect of nozzles angle on the a cold/hot outlets flow and
b maximum COP
5 Conclusions
A series of experiments have been conducted to investigate
the performance of the vortex tube under several design
parameters mainly: (1) inlet pressure, (2) cold mass fraction, (3) number of inlet nozzles, (4) vortex stopper location, (5) nozzle inlet angle, and (6) nozzles arrangements.
The following were concluded from the experimental data:
1.
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(a)
6.
References
(b) 0.12
2 Jets-beside (R )
2 Jets-beside (HP)
2 Jets-across (R )
2 Jets-across (HP)
0.1
COP
0.08
0.06
0.04
0.02
0
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
2.
3.
4.
5.
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