Integration Of Vortex Tubes In A Trigenerative Compressed Air Energy Storage System

Trigenerative compressed air energy storage systems are a promising avenue to increase renewable energy penetration in isolated communities. However, throttling losses are high when air is stored at high pressure into tanks. In this work, vortex tubes are proposed to convert part of the excess pressure into useful heating and cooling. Vortex tubes are optimized for the specific need of the community of Aupaluk using two different multiobjective algorithms and validated thermodynamic models for both vortex tubes and the compressed air energy storage system. Results show that vortex tubes increase the performance of the system for five different performance metrics and that they may generate liquid carbon dioxide from atmospheric air as an additional byproduct. This work demonstrated the potential of vortex tubes in compressed air energy storage systems, but experimental and numerical works are necessary to confirm their performance at high inlet pressure.