Simulation and experimental investigation of an organic phase change material-based air-cooling system for industrial applications in the hot climate

ABSTRACT

This work proposes a novel cooling system of the inlet air for industrial applications in the hot climates using organic phase change material. This cooling system consists of an inductive fan, an underground heat exchanger including double pipe phase change material. A three-dimensional transient simulation was developed to predict cooling capacity (temperature drop) using the analytical solution method within the MATLAB open-source code software. A prototype of the system was designed, built and tested in laboratory conditions to validate the modeling results. The experimental setup shows an average temperature reduction of 6°C in the air-cooling system in nine working hours, which matches with the simulation results with a variance of less than 2%. Further simulations demonstrated that an industrial scale could reduce the average temperature of intake air to 10°C in 7 hours working. The offline analysis proved a significant energy conservation opportunity in power plants. This study showed that energy performance and power generation of an industrial-scale gas turbine can be improved by 1% and 1.2 MW, respectively.

KEYWORDS:

• Air-cooling
• energy efficiency
• gas turbine
• ground-combined source heat exchanger
• power generation

Acknowledgments

The present study is supported by the Materials and Energy Research Center (MERC) through grant No. 571395055.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Nomenclature

Table