Preliminary Report on the Baseline Thermal and Hydraulic Performance Tests of a Sieve Tray Direct Contact Heat Exchanger

摘要

A sieve tray direct contact heat exchanger was designed, built and then tested in a binary power cycle at the Raft River geothermal test site. A series of baseline thermal and hydraulic tests were conducted with an isobutane working fluid. The evaluation of these tests is reported. The testing of the DCHX confirmed that the repeated forming and coalescence of the working fluid drops in the sieve tray column produce excellent heat transfer performance. Tray thermal efficiencies were at or above the design value of 70% and the pinch points were well under the design goal of 1 exp 0 F (too small to be measured with installed instrumentation). From a hydraulic standpoint, the column operated at the working fluid velocities from the plate holes corresponding to the predicted condition of maximum total drop surface area (or minimum drop size) when the unit was operating near the flooding limits, or throughputs. This is the recommended working fluid hole velocity for use in designing sieve tray columns. The geothermal flow limits encountered (at flooding) corresponded roughly to the thermal rise velocity of a 1/32-inch drop. This is a drop size commonly used for specifying the terminal velocity (or continuous fluid velocity) in the design of columns for mass transfer applications. (ERA citation 08:014586)