Experimental investigation of thermal potential at diesel engine exhaust and numerical simulation of heat recovery in heat exchangers

The exhaust gas from an internal combustion engine carries away about 30% of the heat of combustion. The energy available in the exit stream of many energy conversion devices goes to waste, if not utilized properly. The major technical constraint that prevents the successful implementation of waste heat recovery is due to its intermittent and time mismatched demand and availability of energy. In this regard, the present work focused on investigating the thermal potential available at the diesel engine exhaust and its utilization for various applications. In this work, experimental investigations have been performed to identify the thermal potential available at diesel engine exhaust for different load conditions. Now to recover the available thermal potential, a double pipe heat exchanger of counter flow type has been modeled in ANSYS Design Modular. The same has been numerically simulated in ANSYS workbench environment to get the outlet temperatures of hot and cold fluids. The results have been evaluated for heat exchanger, operating at engine exhaust temperature of 478 K and cold water temperature of 298 K. Simulation results shows cold outlet temperature as 435.11 K. © 2022