Experimental investigation on cooling performance of vortex tube with rectifier using Taguchi method

Abstract

In this article, an experimental study was carried out to investigate the cooling efficiency of a vortex tube equipped with a rectifier utilizing the Taguchi method for analysis. The Coefficient of Performance (COP) was determined as the quality characteristics. In the current study, the inlet pressure, distance between the rectifier and the hot end, the position of the rectifier, the height of the rectifier, the number of blades, the length of blades, the inclination angle of blades with and without ring were selected as the key control factors and levels. Taguchi L18 orthogonal array was applied to design the experiments. The Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), regression, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and residual analysis were applied to optimise the combination for COP of the vortex tube. The tests were also conducted to validate the reliability of the predicted optimisation method. Experimental results indicated that: (i) the predicted optimal value falls within a Confidence Interval (CI) of 95%. The analysis also revealed that the length of the blades could be the most influential control factor, accounting for 36.9% of the cooling performance. (ii) the height of the rectifier shows little impact, only contributing 4.7% to the overall cooling performance. (iii) the order of other control factors on COP was inlet pressure (21%), whether the rectifiers with or without ring (12.8%), distance between the rectifier and the hot end (7.9%), the inclination angle of blades (6.2%) and the number of blades (5.3%).