Multi-Stage Compressor Heat Recovery With Series Coolant Routing
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Traditional methods for recovering energy from compressed gas in multi-stage compressors face inefficiencies due to limited coolant flow speed, leading to reduced heat transfer and increased risk of calcification, as well as suboptimal compressor efficiency.
Innovation Solution
Guiding coolant through heat exchangers in series, ensuring higher inlet temperatures for subsequent exchangers, and incorporating a tertiary part in at least one exchanger to maintain coolant speed and enhance heat transfer, while regulating compressor element speeds to achieve maximum efficiency.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of energy
If the coolant flow is throttled to increase coolant heating and energy recovery, then energy recovery is improved, but coolant flow speed is greatly reduced leading to calcification and reduced heat transfer
Solution Approach 1:
The coolant flow is divided into multiple parallel circuits, each with its own heat exchanger. This segmentation allows the total coolant flow to be distributed across multiple paths, maintaining higher flow velocities in each individual heat exchanger while still enabling significant overall heat recovery from the compressed gas streams.
Solution Approach 2:
The invention introduces a temporal dimension to the heat recovery process by using sequential cooling stages. The coolant absorbs heat from multiple compressed gas streams in sequence across different stages, accumulating thermal energy without requiring throttling of the coolant flow. This multi-stage sequential approach enables comprehensive energy recovery while preserving adequate flow speeds.
2Loss of energy
If the coolant flow speed is reduced to increase energy recovery, then compression heat recovery is improved, but heat transfer efficiency in heat exchangers deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The heat recovery system is segmented into multiple parallel heat exchanger circuits, each handling a portion of the total thermal load. This segmentation ensures that each heat exchanger operates with adequate coolant flow velocity to maintain high heat transfer coefficients, while the cumulative effect across all circuits achieves comprehensive energy recovery.
Solution Approach 2:
The system maintains continuous coolant flow through all heat exchangers simultaneously, ensuring uninterrupted heat transfer operation. The parallel circuit configuration allows continuous circulation at optimal velocities, preventing the discontinuous or reduced-flow operation that would occur with throttling, thereby sustaining high heat transfer efficiency throughout the process.
3Ease of manufacture
If coolant is guided in parallel through heat exchangers, then heat exchanger design is simplified, but coolant heating is limited reducing energy recovery potential
Solution Approach 1:
The system uses multiple independent parallel heat exchanger circuits, each with standardized design and configuration. This segmentation into identical or similar modular units maintains design simplicity and ease of manufacture, while the combined thermal capacity of all circuits enables comprehensive energy recovery that exceeds what a single heat exchanger could achieve.
Solution Approach 2:
Multiple parallel heat exchanger circuits are merged into a unified heat recovery system with a common coolant distribution and collection manifold. This merging allows the individual heat exchangers to work together synergistically, accumulating thermal energy from multiple compressed gas streams simultaneously, thereby achieving high overall energy recovery while each individual unit maintains simple, standardized design.
Applied Scientific Principles
This section explains which scientific principles are used to turn an abstract innovation direction into a practical engineering solution.
Function Achieved in This Case
This approach increases energy recovery, reduces calcification risk, and optimizes compressor efficiency by maintaining higher coolant flow rates and improving heat transfer between gas and coolant, allowing for closer operation to compressor limits without safety concerns.
Implementation Method 1
a heat exchanger with a primary and a secondary part, more specifically a primary part through which the compressed gas from a compression stage upstream from the heat exchanger is guided, and a secondary part through which coolant is guided to recover part of the compression heat from the compressed gas
Data Source
AI summary
Method for recovering energy when compressing a gas using a compressor system with two or more compression stages, with each stage having a compressor element. Downstream from at least two compressor elements there is a heat exchanger having a primary and a secondary part. The coolant is guided successively in series through the secondary part of at least two heat exchangers, and the guiding sequence is chosen such that the temperature at the inlet of the primary part of at least one subsequent heat exchanger is higher than or equal to the temperature at the inlet of the primary part of a preceding heat exchanger, relative to the direction of flow of the coolant. At least one heat exchanger is provided with a tertiary part for a coolant.