Performance analysis of the water-injected centrifugal vapor compressor

In industrial production, mechanical vapor recompression (MVR) technology is becoming more widely used. The performance of MVR will be further enhanced, if it can be combined with the wet compression technology. However, the water-injected vapor compression is different from the wet air compression. In addition, the working environment of the centrifugal compressor is more complicated, which has tremendous potential in the MVR system. In this paper, the performance of the water-injected centrifugal vapor compressor was analyzed by adopting numerical simulation and experimental methods. Since the injected water is atomized before entering the compressor, this study mainly analyses the impact of atomization uniformity on the water-injected compression and proposes a method to improve atomization uniformity only by changing the parameter of the system. The results showed that excessive diameter of droplets after atomization affects the stable operation of the compressor and enhancing the atomization uniformity can greatly reduce the outlet temperature of the compressor. Moreover, increasing the water-injection mass flow rate not only reduce the outlet temperature but also improve atomization uniformity and compression performance, but the excessive water-injection mass flow rate may cause the compressor to surge.