Refrigeration – Processes – Congealing flowable material – e.g. – ice making
Patent
1995-12-19
1998-06-23
Doerrler, William
Refrigeration
Processes
Congealing flowable material, e.g., ice making
1651091, 165DIG84, 165DIG325, F25C 512, F28F 1312
Patent
active
057688940
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates in general to heat transfer apparatus and methods for evaporating, distilling, freezing, heating or cooling liquids, and more specifically, to an orbital drive for a whip rod used in conjunction with a tube and surrounding shell type of heat exchanger.
When processing fluids, it is often required to transfer heat to or from the liquid using a heat exchange surface, typically one formed of sheet metal, and a second process fluid on the opposite side of the sheet metal that is at a different temperature than the liquid being processed. This heat transfer between fluids may serve to warm the process fluid or cool it, as in a glycol chiller commonly used in building air conditioning systems. It may also serve to change the phase of the fluid, as in the production of fresh water by boiling it from sea water, or the production of ice slurries by partially freezing water or a water solution. Ice slurries are useful, among other applications, for cold storage to reduce peak load power demands in building air conditioning systems and to provide refrigeration for food such as milk stored on a dairy farm for transport to a processing plant and fish catches stored on fishing vessels.
The size, and hence cost, of a heat exchanger depends on the heat transfer coefficient, which reflects resistance to heat flow through a layer of a "hot" fluid, a heat exchanger wall separating the hot and cold fluids, a layer of a "cold" fluid, plus deposits forming on either hot or cold surfaces of the wall. For economic reasons, a substantial temperature gradient is required to drive the heat transfer through these resistances. This high gradient limits the energy efficiency of evaporators or freezers by either limiting the number of stages or imposing a higher lift on a vapor compressor
U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,230,529 and 4,441,963 issued to one of the present applicants disclose a new approach to solving these problems. They involve using a vertical, thin-walled, open-ended heat transfer tube (or tubes) driven in an orbital or wobbling motion. This orbital tube motion increases the heat transfer efficiency by reducing the thermal resistance at the inner and outer surfaces of the tube. The motion swirls a liquid to be evaporated into a generally thin film over the inner surface of the tube. This increases the evaporation surface area and decreases the thermal resistance by decreasing the thickness of the liquid layer. The orbital motion also aids in heat transfer into the tube at its outer surface produced by condensation of a heated vapor stream. The condensation increases the thickness of the liquid layer at the outer surface, and hence its thermal resistance. The orbital motion throws off the droplets, thereby increasing the heat transfer at the outer wall.
Both of these patents teach multiple such tubes held in a common container. Eccentrics drive the tubes to undergo a wobbling motion in a horizontal plane. The liquid is driven in turn by a dynamic coupling to revolve over the inner surface as it flows down the tube under the influence of gravity. These arrangements require cranks, bearings and complicated seals inside the evaporator that accommodate this movement. The component parts are difficult and costly to manufacture and assemble, they must be machined to close tolerances, they are susceptible to corrosion and contamination when used in the chemical industry, and they wear, which leads to a deterioration in the balance of the wobbling tubes and attendant vibrations. The '529 patent also discloses a self balancing arrangement with a self adjusting orbital radius that accommodates the balance to changes in mass. However, if the base moves, e.g., if the apparatus is mounted on a moving reference frame such as a ship at sea, the crank radius must be fixed, and even this step may not be adequate.
Many known heat transfer devices ranging from ice cream makers to sophisticated evaporators use a rigid wiper bar that is positively driven to rotate within the tube to spread viscous liquid
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Ho I-Chien
Huang Hong Ding
Li Yao Tzu
Yundt, Jr. Albert
Doerrler William
Manus, Esq. Peter J.
Y.T. Li Engineering, Inc.
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