Performance Enhancement and Life-Cycle Cost Savings of Supercooled Water Ice Slurry Generation Systems Using Heat Regeneration

Abstract

This paper presents the development and utilisation of a heat regeneration approach to enhancing the performance and reducing the life-cycle cost of supercooled water ice slurry generation systems. Two supercooled water systems with direct and indirect ice slurry generation were enhanced by the heat regeneration approach to avoid excessive cold loss and increase the supercooling degree, thereby improving system efficiency while reducing operational costs. Their respective performance and life-cycle costs were experimentally evaluated and compared to the ones without heat regeneration enhancement under different working conditions, as well as to a conventional scraped surface ice slurry generator used as a benchmark. It was found from the comparative investigation that the heat regeneration approach can effectively reduce the water temperature at the inlet of the supercooler, allowing a significant amount of cold loss to be saved for ice slurry generation. The effective utilisation rate of cold can be effectively improved by over 15% when using the heat regeneration approach, and the unit ice mass power consumption can be reduced by 12–20%. Due to the attractive energy-saving potential, the operational cost-effectiveness of the enhanced systems contributed to cut-down of life-cycle cost. It was found that the life-cycle costs of the enhanced direct and indirect ice slurry generation systems were 62.0% and 74.7% lower than that of the conventional scraped surface ice slurry generator, respectively.