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.

Bubble Pump Models Verification Based on the Experimental Results

DAR （diffusion absorption refrigeration） cycle is driven by heat and has no moving parts. It is based on refrigerant and absorbent as the working fluid together with hydrogen as an auxiliary inert gas. To circulate the working fluid without a mechanical pump, the diffusion absorption cycle relies on a bubble pump. Experimental system was designed and operated. Its aim was to investigate the performance of a bubble pump operating with three lifting tubes. The experimental results of the system were compared to existing models. The comparison showed that there was a bad agreement between the experimental and the theoretical results.

Numerical analysis of bubble dynamics in the diffuser of a jet pump under variable ambient pressure

Recent studies have shown that the collapse of cavitation bubbles in a jet pump can generate an extremely high pressure with many potential applications. The dynamics of the bubble is governed by the Rayleigh-Plesset equation. With the bubble dynamics equation and the heat and mass transfer model solved with the Runge-Kutta fourth order adaptive step size method, the oscillations of the bubble in the diffuser of the jet pump are assessed under varied conditions. To obtain the pressure variation along the diffuser, the Bernoulli equation and the pressure measured in experiment are coupled. The results of simulation show that a transient motion of the bubbles can be obtained in the diffuser quantitatively, to obtain the pressure and temperature shock in the bubble. Moreover, increasing the outlet pressure coefficient would result in a more intense bubble collapsing process, which can be used in the subsequent studies of the cavitation applications. The predictions are compared with experiments with good agreement.