The Danish company Advansor, which manufactures CO2 air conditioning systems such as heat pumps and air conditioners, was faced with the problem of pressure loss upstream of one of its ejectors. To solve this problem, Advansor investigated whether the design could be optimized for 3D printing.
With the support of 3D printing specialists from the Danish Technological Institute (DTI), Advansor managed to reduce the original 17 parts to just three. This design change enables smoother transitions between different pipe sizes, which reduces pressure loss.
“For us, pressure loss is a matter of energy loss and a larger climate footprint, and therefore it is always interesting for us to optimize. 3D printing is ideal for us because of its large degree of design freedom, which means that we can design the desired geometry. With 3D printing, you can print a very compact part, which at the same time is easy to integrate into our systems,” says Kenneth B. Madsen, CTO at Advansor.
By optimizing the design and using 3D printing, there is great potential to significantly reduce the carbon footprint. The system uses CO2 to generate heat, but the design advantages of 3D printing allow the heat to be better utilized when the gas is distributed in the heat pump.
“With 3D printing, we can design a Y-piece and place two ejectors next to each other, so the flow into the ejectors becomes better. This results in higher pressure both before and after, generating more heat, thus saving energy from other energy sources to use for district heating. This gives you a better overall efficiency for your system”, said Sigurd Vigen Pedersen, consultant at DTI.
Sustainability can be divided into two aspects.Firstly, there is the material aspect, which plays a subordinate role in this project, as only a small amount of material is saved. The main aspect, however, is energy savings.The energy saving for a single component is around 1 percent. This may not seem like much, but for a 2 MW heat pump this corresponds to a saving of 70,000 kWh per year – or the equivalent of 19,400 kg of CO2 per year.
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