Ebook: Experimental study of heat transfer enhancement in a liquid piston compressor/expander using porous media inserts

The efficiency and power density of gas compression and expansion are strongly dependent on heat
transfer during the process. Since porous media inserts can significantly increase heat transfer surface
area, their addition to a liquid piston compressor/expander has been hypothesized to reduce the time
to complete the compression or expansion process and hence the power density for a given thermody-
namic efficiency; or to increase the thermodynamic efficiency at a fixed power density. This paper pre-
sents an experimental investigation on heat transfer with porous inserts during compression for a
pressure ratio of 10 and during expansion for a pressure ratio of 6. A baseline case without inserts and
five cases with different porous inserts are tested in a compression experiment: 3 interrupted ABS inserts
with plate spacing of 2.5, 5, and 10 mm and 2 aluminum foam inserts sized with 10 and 40 pores per inch.
The 2.5 mm and 5 mm interrupted plate inserts were also tested in expansion experiments. Porous
inserts are found, in compression, to increase power-density by 39-fold at 95% efficiency and to increase
efficiency by 18% at 100 kW=m3 power density; in expansion, power density is increased three fold at 89%
efficiency, and efficiency is increased by 7% at 150 kW=m3. Surface area increase is found to be the pre-
dominant cause in the improvement in performance. Thus, a liquid piston compressor/expander together
with a porous medium may be used in applications requiring high compression ratios, high efficiencies,
and high power density such as in an open-accumulator compressed air energy storage (CAES) system or
a compressor for compressed natural gas (CNG).