Chapter1

INTRODUCTION
1.1 VORTEX TUBE REFRIGERATION SYSTEM
The Vortex Tube is an effective and low cost solution to a wide variety of industrial spot
cooling and process cooling needs. We can say Vortex tube is a device which produces
cooling at one end and heating at the other end simultaneously. The general name of
vortex tube is cooling tube also, which instantaneously create streams of high and low
temperature with respect to the temperature of the air which is used as a feed. The highly
compressed air is forcing through a generation chamber, and by the virtue of high
pressure and limited volume the pressure head of feeding air is get converted into the
kinetic head which generates the centrifugal spin of air along the inner walls of the tube.
It is evident that the cooling unit part does not incorporate any moving part if high
pressure air is available. It has no moving parts; pressurized gas is injected tangentially
into a swirl chamber and accelerates to a high rate of rotations. The Compressed air which
is supplied to the vortex tube and passes through nozzles that are tangent to an internal
counter bore. These nozzles set the air in a vortex motion. This spinning stream of air
turns 90 and passes down the hot tube in the form of a spinning shell, similar to a
tornado Due to the conical nozzle at the end of the tube, only the outer shell of the
compressed gas is allowed to escape at that end. The remainder of the gas is forced to
return in an inner vortex of reduced diameter within the outer vortex. A percentage of the
hot, high-speed air is permitted to exit at the control valve. The remainder of the (now
slower) air stream is forced to counter flow up through the center of the high-speed air
stream, giving up heat, through the center of the generation chamber finally exiting
through the opposite end as extremely cold air. For the performance analysis of this kind
of vortex tube is being made on the basis of some series of different-different mechanical,
physical and constructional features and the performance of tube depends upon:
(a) Air parameter
(b) Tube parameter

Fig 1.1 Flow Diagram of a vortex tube

1.2 INTRODUCTORY BACKGROUNDS

The phenomenon of generating two streams at different temperatures from a vortex tube
with single injection was discovered by Ranque in 1930s, and hence was named as
Ranque effect. Without any moving parts or chemical reaction within the tube, the
phenomenon results only from the fluid dynamic effects.[1]
It is shown in Figure that a typical vertex-flow vortex tube contains a straight tube
with tangential injection, through which compressed gas is injected into the tube, and two
exits located at each end of the tube, which allows the streams at different temperatures to
be exhausted from the vortex tube. As shown, the tube is completely hollow and there are
no other parts inside the tube; hence, the separation of the two streams at different
temperatures inside the vortex tube must be based on some fluid dynamic or
thermodynamic effects. Other types of vortex tubes will be discussed in the flowing
chapter, including the uni-flow vortex tube, which has the cold and hot exists located at
the same end of the tube. Since only the counter-flow vortex tube was investigated in this
study, hereafter the vortex tube, without any further specific description, will refer to a
counter-flow vortex tube.[2]

Figure 1.2 Flow structure in a counter-flow vortex tube

2

It has been observed that when the compressed gas is injected into the tube tangentially
at a high velocity, it starts rotating and moving to the hot end, i.e. the other end from the
injection small portion of the flow escapes from the gap between the control plug and the
tube with higher temperature than at the injection point, which in the literature is referred
to as the hot stream. The other part of the flow is then forced back by the control plug
and moves to the cold end through the central region of the tube. This central flow is then
exhausted from the central exit near the injection point, at a lower temperature than at the
injection, and forms the cold stream. Thus, the injected flow is divided into two flows
with different temperatures, and this phenomenon is well known as the temperature
separation in a vortex tube or Ranque effect.