An experimental & theoretical study of slurry ice formation & release in a periodically supercooled falling liquid film

Completed

Energy Efficiency(Residential and commercial)
Other Power and Storage Technologies(Energy storage)
Energy Efficiency(Industry)

Basic and strategic applied research

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Mechanical, Aeronautical and Manufacturing Engineering)

Not Cross-cutting

Professor T Davies
Engineering Computer Science and Maths
University of Exeter

Standard

EPSRC

01 October 2004

30 September 2007

36 months

£101,071

Process engineering

South West

Chemical Engineering Responsive -- Process Environment and Sustainability

Professor T Davies, Engineering Computer Science and Maths, University of Exeter

Dr G Tabor, Engineering Computer Science and Maths, University of Exeter

Pumpable ice slurry is a new material with considerable potential as a heat transfer fluid and thermal storage medium.The complexity and poor reliability of existing ice slurry generators is inhibiting widespread adoption of ice slurry as a coolant.A new system of generating slurry ice has been developed and tested. This uses cyclical recuperative heat transfer for ice removal from the refrigerated surfaces, rather than mechanical scraping.This device opens the way to other fundamental improvements in the ice production process. It is now proposed to use a simple falling film system to supercool a flow of binary fluid in a cyclical fashion. It is expected that during any one cycle ice crystals will be precipitated from solution at a rate dependent on residence time in the film and some will be carried away by the flow whilst others will adhere to the refrigerated vertical plate and will be periodically removed by heat exchange.The proposal is to study experimentally the slurry icegeneration and removal processes and their dependence on the plate temperature, the plate heat transfer rate, defrost frequency, the binary fluid flow rate, concentration and composition with the objective of minimising specific energy consumption for the generation of slurry ice at selected concentrations.A collateral aim is to model the heat and mass transfer processes at work in this system as aid to further understanding, provide a framework for the correlation of experimental data, and provide possible pointers for further improvement in system design and operation. The end product will be the technological know-how needed to advance the current state-of-the-art in ice slurry production techniques

01/01/07