Energy Analysis of a Novel Ejector-Compressor Cooling Cycle Driven by Electricity and Heat (Waste Heat or Solar Energy)

Abstract

Low-grade heat is abundantly available as solar thermal energy and as industrial waste heat. Non concentrating solar collectors can provide heat with temperatures 75−100 °C. In this paper, a new system is proposed and analyzed which enhances the electrical coefficient of performance (COP) of vapour compression cycle (VCC) by incorporating low-temperature heat-driven ejectors. This novel system, ejector enhanced vapour compression refrigeration cycle (EEVCRC), significantly increases the electrical COP of the system while utilizing abundantly available low-temperature solar or waste heat (below 100 °C). This system uses two ejectors in an innovative way such that the higher-pressure ejector is used at the downstream of the electrically driven compressor to help reduce the delivery pressure for the electrical compressor. The lower pressure ejector is used to reduce the quality of wet vapour at the entrance of the evaporator. This system has been modelled in Engineering Equation Solver (EES) and its performance is theoretically compared with conventional VCC, enhanced ejector refrigeration system (EERS), and ejection-compression system (ECS). The proposed EEVCRC gives better electrical COP as compared to all the three systems. The parametric study has been conducted and it is found that the COP of the proposed system increases exponentially at lower condensation temperature and higher evaporator temperature. At 50 °C condenser temperature, the electrical COP of EEVCRC is 50% higher than conventional VCC while at 35 °C, the electrical COP of EEVCRC is 90% higher than conventional VCC. For the higher temperature heat source, and hence the higher generator temperatures, the electrical COP of EEVCRC increases linearly while there is no increase in the electrical COP for ECS. The better global COP indicates that a small solar collector will be needed if this system is driven by solar thermal energy. It is found that by using the second ejector at the upstream of the electrical compressor, the electrical COP is increased by 49.2% as compared to a single ejector system.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/su12198178
Divisions: College of Engineering & Physical Sciences > School of Engineering and Technology > Mechanical, Biomedical & Design
College of Engineering & Physical Sciences
Additional Information: © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Uncontrolled Keywords: CCP,Efficiency,Ejector,Energy,Low-grade heat,Refrigeration,VCC,Vapour compression,Geography, Planning and Development,Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment,Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Publication ISSN: 2071-1050
Last Modified: 30 Sep 2024 12:32
Date Deposited: 06 Oct 2020 10:56
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2020-10-04
Accepted Date: 2020-09-25
Authors: Riaz, Fahid
Tan, Kah Hoe
Farooq, Muhammad
Imran, Muhammad (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-3057-1301)
Lee, Poh Seng

Download

[img]

Version: Published Version

License: Creative Commons Attribution

| Preview

Export / Share Citation


Statistics

Additional statistics for this record