Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
15th International Conference on Computational Heat & Mass Transfer, Antalya, Türkiye, 19 - 22 Mayıs 2025, (Tam Metin Bildiri)
Providing high-pressure compressible gas streams is a requirement in various industrial processes related to energy storage, transportation, propulsion, and petrochemistry. For a wide range of flow rates and pressures, oil-free reciprocating piston compressors are commonly employed for this purpose due to their portability, small form factor and inherent safety. These compressors are called booster pumps if the intake gas is already at high pressure. Modeling and designing reciprocating compressors, especially booster pumps, are important since making changes in product specifications is time-consuming and expensive. Designing a high-pressure compressor for a desired set of throughput and delivery pressure depends heavily on suction and discharge gas temperature and pressure, rotating shaft power and mechanics, compression ratio within the piston barrel, check valve properties such as cracking pressure and conductance, materials used in the piston, barrel and seals, and finally, the efficiency of heat transfer. Due to this complexity, the design and manufacturing of high-pressure reciprocating compressor is commonly conducted through trial-and-error, and a very small number of companies possess the experience and funds to iterate and develop new compressors with desired properties. Interestingly, experimental and computational studies are scarce in literature as well, therefore there appears a need to establish a robust and capable modeling framework that can unravel key points for high-pressure compressor design.
In this study, a new and comprehensive modeling framework was developed for predicting the effects of operation and design parameters on compressor performance. First, a 2-D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model was developed to simulate compression, fluid flow and heat transfer inside the piston-barrel assembly with semi-empirical check-valve flow physics taken into account. It was hypothesized that heat exchange with the surroundings plays an important role in compressor performance. To fill this gap, experiments were conducted in a test bed to measure the overall heat transfer coefficient that describes the heat loss from the gas inside the barrel. Finally, for rapid sizing, prototyping and exploration, a macroscopic model was developed to assist and replicate CFD results with significantly less computational resources. The results of the modeling work will be shared along with comparison to data obtained on a prototype booster that can operate with an outlet pressure of 140-700 bar.