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Ejector Design

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Ejectors for Efficient Refrigeration

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Abstract

Ejector design may be performed at various levels of complexity. In many cases, ejectors are designed in a rather empirical way, and the only elements of the ejector geometry that receive a calculation effort are the main flow sections. Other elements, like the mixing zone length or the angle of the secondary flow inlet, are left to the experience of the designer. The effect of other details, like the presence of fillets between conical and cylindrical parts, is also neglected.

Indeed, a detailed analysis of the influence of geometrical details on the supersonic flow is not feasible with analytical tools. The only way to get a complete picture of the flow field is to analyze the ejector by a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) approach. However, it must be stressed that CFD is not a design tool. The complete geometry of the ejector must be known in advance before any CFD analysis is attempted. Eventually, the design may be modified in order to mitigate any problem that could be revealed by the CFD results, but there is no way to state that all possible design options have been explored.

Probably, a hybrid approach combining a first scrutiny of possible configurations and a subsequent CFD analysis could be an answer. In the following sections, a few simple design tools will be presented, while the potential offered by up-to-date CFD techniques will be resumed in the following chapter.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The first-law efficiency cannot be defined for an adiabatic ejector because energy is conserved.

  2. 2.

    This should be the best configuration for loss reduction in a real machine, because the compressor deals just with the secondary flow and works with a lower pressure ratio. For an ideal cycle, it doesn’t matter which of the two options is selected, because there are no losses in any case.

  3. 3.

    McGovern et al. (2012) call this reversible entrainment ratio efficiency, η RER.

  4. 4.

    This is simply a particular kind of surrogate modeling approach in which the response surface is explored by means of a genetic algorithm.

  5. 5.

    Despite this, the two parts of the system can produce and require different “work per cycle” and have different areas in a T-s diagram depending on the corresponding mass of the operating fluid.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Giuseppe Grazzini, Adriano Milazzo & Federico Mazzelli

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  1. Giuseppe Grazzini
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  2. Adriano Milazzo
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  3. Federico Mazzelli
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Grazzini, G., Milazzo, A., Mazzelli, F. (2018). Ejector Design. In: Ejectors for Efficient Refrigeration. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75244-0_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75244-0_3

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