Performance of Ice Generation System Using Supercooled Water with a Directed Evaporating Method

Abstract

Ice slurry is widely used in the field of ice storage air conditioning, district cooling, seafood preservation, and milk processing. Ice generation using supercooled water is efficient, and the system structure is compact. However, a secondary refrigerant cycle is usually used in order to control the wall temperature and to prevent the “ice blocking” problem. Therefore, an ice generation system using supercooled water with a directed evaporating method is proposed and fabricated in order to improve the system performance, which is tested in the experiment. Then, two calculation methods are used to study the performance of entire ice generation system. We concluded that: (1) The system could run steady without “ice blocking” in the condition where the supercooled water temperature was higher than 271.7 K and the velocity was more than 2.1 m/s. The entire system COP could reach 1.6 when the condenser temperature was about 319 K. (2) The system COP could be improved by about 20% if the compressor output power was based on the theoretical refrigerant cycle. The system COP could reach about 2.5 if the proportion of extra power was 3% and the condenser temperature was 308 K. (3) The system COP with a directed evaporating method was about 14% higher than that with an indirected evaporating method. (4) An orthogonal test was built to quantify the influence of different critical parameters. The influence of factors on the system COP were as follows: condenser temperature > water flow > adiabatic compressibility > refrigerant. This work provided a good look at the performance of an ice generation system using supercooled water with a directed evaporating method. It can play an important role in guiding the design of a system of ice generation using supercooled water.