Additional Power Generation From Waste Energy of Diesel Engine Using Parallel Flow Shell and Tube Heat Exchanger

Abstract

High temperature diesel engine exhaust gas can be an important source of heat to operate a bottoming Rankine cycle to produce additional power. In this research, an experiment was performed to calculate the available energy in the exhaust gas of an automotive diesel engine. A shell and tube heat exchanger was used to extract heat from the exhaust gas, and the performance of two shell and tube heat exchangers was investigated with parallel flow arrangement using water as the working fluid. The heat exchangers were purchased from the market. As the design of these heat exchangers was not optimal, the effectiveness was found to be 0.52, which is much lower than the ideal one for this type of application. Therefore, with the available experimental data, the important geometric aspects of the heat exchanger, such as the number and diameter of the tubes and the length and diameter of the shell, were optimized using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. The optimized heat exchanger effectiveness was found to be 0.74. Using the optimized heat exchangers, simulation was conducted to estimate the possible additional power generation considering 70% isentropic turbine efficiency. The proposed optimized heat exchanger was able to generate 20.6% additional power, which resulted in improvement of overall efficiency from 30% to 39%. Upon investigation of the effect of the working pressure on additional power generation, it was found that higher additional power can be achieved at higher working pressure. For this particular application, 30 bar was found to be the optimum working pressure at rated load. The working pressure was also optimized at part load and found that 2 and 20 were the optimized working pressures for 25% and 83% load. As a result 1.8% and 13.3% additional power were developed, respectively. Thus, waste heat recovery technology has a great potential for saving energy, improving overall engine efficiency, and reducing toxic emission per kilowatt of power generation.