A FIELD APPLICATION CASE OF THE DIRECT ICE SLURRY TRANSPORTING SYSTEM FOR DISTRICT COOLING

In order to investigate the feasibility of the direct ice slurry transporting system for the purpose of district cooling, a case study of field application is performed. The research aims to include the field measurement of ice packing factor, the performance of cold energy delivery, and the branching characteristics of ice slurry in which the additive is propylene glycol wt 10%. Two representative types of pipe branch are dealt with in this work. For the slurry flow with ice volume fraction of 0.16 or less, the pipe blocking due to aggregation is not observed. It is confirmed that the mass flow rate of ice slurry per unit cooling load markedly decreases with the increase of the ice content. The pumping power also decreases, but remains unchanged when the ice fractions are higher than a certain level.