A Design Process for Reduction of Pressure Drop of Air-cooled Condenser for Waste Heat Recovery System

Abstract

: A novel design process of a parallel multi-flow type air-cooled condenser of a dual-loop waste heat recovery system with Rankine steam cycles for improving the fuel efficiency of gasoline automobiles has been investigated focusing on reduction of the pressure drop inside the micro-tubes. The low temperature condenser plays a role to dissipate heat from the system by condensing the low temperature loop working fluid sufficiently. However, the refrigerant has low evaporation temperature enough to recover the waste from engine coolant of about 100°C but has small saturation enthalpy so that excessive mass flow rate of the LT working fluid, e.g., over 150 g/s, causes enormously large pressure drop of the working fluid to maintain the heat dissipation performance of more than 20 kW. This paper has dealt with the scheme to design the low temperature condenser that has reduced pressure drop while ensuring the required thermal performance. The number of pass, the arrangement of the tubes of each pass, and the positions of the inlet and outlet ports on the header are most critical parameters affecting the flow uniformity through all the tubes of the condenser. For the purpose of the performance predictions and the parametric study for the LT condenser, we have developed a 1-dimensional user-friendly performance prediction program that calculates feasibly the phase change of the working fluid in the tubes. An example is presented through the proposed design process and compared with an experiment.