In the Revolving Vane (RV) compressor being introduced recently (Teh and Ooi, 2006), it has been shown that there remains significant friction occurring at the vane sides although the overall frictional loss in the compressor is expected to be small. In order to further improve the mechanical efficiency of the RV compressor, this paper presents a design improvement, named 'Improved Revolving Vane (RV-i) compressor', in which the wear and friction at the vane sides are effectively reduced by rigidly attaching the vane to the rotor. This is because in doing so, the vane side contact forces are relieved of the pressure forces acting across the vane. The frictional losses of the new compressor are formulated and analyzed, where results have shown that the friction are reduced mainly to that at the bearings, achieving a 30 % reduction in frictional losses over its predecessor.
展开▼
