The Potential of Using Vortex Tube to Ameliorate Aircraft Environmental Control System

Abstract

This paper proposes a new air cycle system by replacing the turbine assembly with vortex tubes and a parameter-matching method independent of the architecture of the air cycle system. Only, in terms of refrigerating and dehumidification, the performance of the newly proposed vortex system is worse than that of a conventional air cycle system under the same bleed air parameters. However, for aircraft practical applications, the overall performance of air cycle systems requires additional considerations such as the heating capacity, weight of the system, and extra aviation fuel used to transport that weight. Therefore, this paper conducts an integrated performance comparison between the new system and a conventional system based on the overall fuel mass penalty criterion. The results show that whether the new system has a smaller total takeoff mass depends on the bleed air parameters, flight duration, and flight speed. For specific bleed air parameters, there is a specific [Formula: see text] curve where the new system and the turbine system have the same total takeoff mass. The performance of the new system is better than that of the turbine system only when the values of flight Mach number and flight duration are at the lower left of the [Formula: see text] curve.