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The aim of this paper is to present a thermodynamic cycle for the production of electrical power in the 2-5 kW range, suitable for all types of thermally propelled vehicles. The sensible heat recovered from the exhaust gases feeds the energy recovery system, which is able to produce sufficient power to sustain the air conditioning system or other auxiliaries. The working fluids R134a and R245fa have been used in the ORC system, and the systems are simulated by CAMEL-ProTM software. The cycles are generated starting from the same heat source: the exhaust gas of a typical 2.0 L Diesel engine (or from a small size turbine engine). The design of the condenser has been performed to obtain a very compact component, evaluating the heat exchanger tube and fins type design. Through empirical formulas, the area of heat exchange, the heat required to exchange and the pressure drop in the element have been calculated. A commercial software package is used to build the model of the condenser, then a thermal and mechanical analysis and a CFD analysis are realized to estimate the heat exchange. Finally the evaluations, the possible future studies and possible improvements of the system are shown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiments were carried out to investigate the pressure drop and heat transfer behaviors of a microchannel condenser. The effects of gravity on the condensation of steam in the microchannels were investigated for both horizontal and vertical cases. For the experimental results, the pressure drop of vertical microchannels in the condenser is lower than for horizontal microchannels. In the case of the horizontal microchannel, as the mass flow rate of steam increases from 0.01 g·s−1 to 0.06 g·s−1, the pressure drop increases from 1.5 kPa to 50 kPa, respectively. While the mass flow rate of steam in the vertical microchannel case increases from 0.01 g·s−1 to 0.06 g·s−1, the pressure drop increases from 2.0 kPa to 44 kPa, respectively. This clearly indicates that the gravitational acceleration affects the pressure drop. The pressure drop of the vertical microchannel is lower than that obtained from the horizontal microchannel. In addition, the capacity of the condenser is the same in both cases. This leads to the performance index obtained from the vertical microchannel condenser being higher than that obtained from the horizontal microchannel condenser. These results are important contributions to the research on the condensation of steam in microchannels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a survey of the literature from the last 20 years, 20% of the numerical models used to analyze the performance of adsorption chillers assumed the evaporator and condenser were ideal, with a fixed evaporation temperature and condenser temperature, and ignored interactions between the adsorption bed and evaporator/condenser. Even when the interaction with the evaporator and condenser was included, the other 80% of studies modeled the adsorption bed based on the LPM (lumped parameter method), which ignores the geometry effect and contact resistance of the bed, and thus reduces the accuracy of the analysis. As a consequence, these earlier numerical studies overestimated the system performance of the adsorption chiller. In this study, we conducted a refined numerical approach which avoids these limitations, producing estimates in close agreement with experimental results. Compared with our approach, the models with ideal treatment of evaporator and condenser overestimated COP (coefficient of performance) and SCP (specific cooling power) by as much as 16.12% and 24.64%, respectively. The models based on LPM overestimated COP and SCP by 22.82% and 11.28%, compared to our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]