Experimental study of U-vane compressor

Abstract

With the increasing concerns on environmental issues such as ozone depletion and global warming, there is a need to develop a more environmental friendly and higher energy efficiency refrigeration system. In this project, the development of a new compressor, named U-Vane Compressor (UVC) was presented.

UVC was designed to achieve greater compactness and mechanical efficiency. The novel component introduced in UVC is the vane housing which guides the vane during operation and allows the vane to be shorter. Thus, UVC is able to provide larger working chamber compared to conventional compressors.

In this report, the main components of UVC and their features were showcased. Besides that, the working principles and mathematical models were presented to describe its operating characteristics. In order to validate those formulated models, an UVC prototype was fabricated and tested in an experimental test bed. Measuring devices including thermocouples, pressure transducers, torque meter and encoder were calibrated and used to measure various properties of working fluid.

Limited tests were carried out from 200 rpm to 777 rpm due to the prototype failure at high operational speed. Comparison between simulation data and experimental data were conducted to determine the performance of the UVC prototype. Lastly, some recommendations for future works were discussed and it is believed that with more improvement works, UVC has the potential to be a compressor with greater efficiency in the future.