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Abstract High temperature heat pumps (HTHP) have the potential to reduce CO2 emission in multiple industrial processes. It is a key technology for the heat recovery from various sources and will contribute to the decarbonization pathways. The selection of high temperature refrigerant is important to the system performance, cost-effectiveness and environmental-friendly requirement. It also leads to some challenges for the compressor design, which is an area under active development. In this work, a methodology for HTHP centrifugal compressor design is presented. The heat pump cycle analysis and the compressor meanline design are coupled in the initial phase to study the selection of refrigerants and its impact on compressor design. Following this, the impeller was designed using a 3D inverse design method. Automatic optimization was carried out to optimize the impeller performance. The downstream volute was also designed by using a unique inverse design method. Finally, the performance of the compressor stage was verified by computational fluid dynamics simulations. The structural integrity of the compressor was also examined by finite element analysis. The result shows it is important to couple the compressor design with the refrigeration cycle analysis and through the state-of-art compressor design/optimization techniques centrifugal compressor designs can be efficiently generated for HTHP applications.
Zhang et al. (Mon,) studied this question.