Experimental evaluation of vortex tube and its application in a novel trigenerative compressed air energy storage system

With the increasing penetration of volatile renewable energy sources into the energy market, the importance of energy storage systems is becoming more and more significant. Compressed air energy storage (CAES) technology has attracted a lot of attention in recent years due to its significant advantages such as high reliability with few physical and environmental constraints. A novel CAES system combining vortex tube for combined cooling, heating and power supply is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the feasibility of vortex tube application in CAES system is verified by experiment. The performance of the vortex tube under different working conditions is summarized and the relative error of the modified vortex tube model is less than 1.12%. Based on the above, the thermodynamic model of the proposed CAES system incorporating vortex tubes is established. The performance evaluation and parametric analysis of the described system are presented. It is found that the System power efficiency (PSE), System energy efficiency (SENE) and exergy efficiency reach 8.300%, 98.264% and 22.495%, respectively, under the design parameters. The PSE and SENE of the system are both enhanced with the increase of evaporation temperature and hot gas temperature.