Design and experimental study on a small cryogenic turboexpander with aerodynamic gas bearing
A small cryogenic air turboexpander equipped with a radial-thrust aerodynamicgas bearing was designed and de-veloped.The journal diameter of turboexpander is 22 mm and the inlet diameter of impeller is 36.2 mm.The performance of the turboexpander was tested on an air refrigerator test rig.The numerical simulations were conducted on the flow passage of the tur-boexpander,and the simulated results were compared with the experimental data.The variations of isotropic efficiency of the sim-ulations and experiments were found to be similar,and the average error between the simulation and experiment results is 3％.In the experiment,the rotating speed of the turboexpander reached 112 200 r/min under the inlet temperature of 283.2 K and the inlet pressure of 0.26 MPa.At this time,the mass flow rate was 0.21 kg/s,with a cooling capacity of 7.75 kW.
Turbine expanderAerodynamic gas bearingsAir refrigeratorExperimental study
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NSTL
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