Performance Improvement of Ranque-Hilsch Vortex Tube by Using Conical Hot Tube

Refrigeration plays an important role in developing countries, primarily for the preservation of food, medicine, and for air conditioning. Conventional refrigeration systems are using Freon as refrigerant. As they are the main cause for depleting ozone layer, extensive research work is going on alternate refrigeration systems. Vortex tube is a non-conventional cooling device, having no moving parts which will produce cold air and hot air from the source of compressed air without affecting the environment. When a high pressure air is tangentially injected into vortex chamber a strong vortex flow will be created which will be split into two air streams. It can be used for any type of spot cooling or heating application. In this paper, vortex tube with cylindrical and conical hot tubes performance is compared. It was found that the vortex tube with a conical angle of about 2.5° surpassed the cylinder tube by 25%∼30% in COP. The conical vortex tube reaches the same or more performance than the normal tube but with a smaller length.