Experimental assessment of two-phase bubble pump for solar water heating

The research goal is to develop a new solar water heater system(SWHS) that uses a solar bubble pump instead of an electric pump.The pump is powered by the steam produced from an evacuated tube collector.Therefore,heat could be transferred downward from the collector to a hot water storage tank.The designed system consists of two sets of heat-pipe evacuated tube collectors,a solar bubble pump installed at an upper level and a water storage tank with a heat exchanger at a lower level.Discharge heads of 1 and 5 m were tested.The bubble pump could operate at the collector temperature of about 90-100 ℃ and vapor gage pressure of 80-90 kPa.It is found that water circulation within the SWHS depends on the incident solar intensity and system discharge head.Experimental investigations are conducted to obtain the system thermal efficiencies from the hourly,daily and long-term performance tests.The thermal performance of the proposed system is compared with conventional solar water heaters.The results show that the proposed system achieves system characteristic efficiency of 10% higher than that of the conventional systems using electric pump if taking the consumption of electric power into account.And the former is a zero carbon system.

Numerical assessment on improving multistage centrifugal impeller performance by changing inlet skew angle at impeller inlet

Multistage centrifugal impellers with four different skew angles were investigated by using computational fluid dynamics.The purpose of this work is to investigate the influences of lean angle at the blade tip of the impeller inlet.Four variations of lean angles,that is,8°,10°,15° and 20°,were made at first stage impeller.Reynolds Average Navier Stokes equation was used in simulation together with a shear?stress transport(SST) k-w turbulence model and mixing-plane approach,respectively.Three dimensional fluid flows were simplified using periodic model to reduce the computational cost and time required.A good performance was expected that the secondary flow can be effectively reduced in the flow passage of the impeller without excessive increase in manufacturing cost caused by the secondary flow.The results show that secondary flow affects the main flow intricately to form vortices or having non-uniform velocity in the flow passage,which in turn results in substantial fluid energy loss not only in the impeller but also in the guide vane downstream of impeller.The numerical solutions were performed and allowed the optimum design and operating conditions to be obtained.