Experimental investigation of water spray injection in liquid piston for near-isothermal compression

•Experimental study using water spray injection in a liquid piston air compressor.•The effect of injection pressure, nozzle angle, and compression speed is studied.•Isothermal compression efficiency increases up to 95% with an increase of injection pressure.•Nozzle angle and compression speed have a marginal effect on the isothermal efficiency.•Spray injection is a highly effective method to achieve a near-isothermal compression. Near-isothermal compression is desired to achieve high efficiency in many compressor applications. Low heat transfer characteristic of conventional compressors is a major bottleneck in attaining a near-isothermal compression. A high heat transfer rate is possible with an injection of a large number of water droplets using a spray nozzle inside the compression chamber. In this paper, the effectiveness of spray injection to achieve near-isothermal compression is investigated experimentally in a liquid piston compressor for a compression ratio of about 2.5. Parametric investigations are performed by varying injection pressures of spray from 10 psi (69 kPa) to 70 psi (483 kPa), using different spray nozzle angles (60°, 90°, and 120°), and by changing the stroke time of compression. It is observed that water spray injection is highly effective in abating the air temperature rise during the compression process. The pressure-volume plots indicate a significant reduction in the compression work, and they approach near-isothermal compression with spray at higher injection pressures. The isothermal efficiency of compression consistently increases with an increased injection pressure of spray and reaches up to 95% at the highest injection pressure studied (70 psi). Furthermore, the spray nozzle angle marginally affected the isothermal efficiency with a 1–4% improvement with the use of a 60° nozzle angle over a 120° spray angle at all injection pressures. Also, comparable isothermal efficiencies are observed for compression with different stroke times between 3 and 5 s especially at higher injection pressures which highlight the efficacy of spray injection in attaining a high power-density along with high efficiency. Overall, with an optimized spray design, water spray injection can achieve a highly efficient near-isothermal compression in liquid piston.