Cooling driven through halogenated gases is putting our environment at risk as its leakage contributes to global warming. One of the green alternative technologies to the current vapor compression technology is cooling through vortex tube, a thermal separation phenomenon. It is a simple device in which pressurized gas is tangentially passed to create two swirls, one with high temperature and the other with the cold temperature that can be used for cooling applications. This device has no moving parts and requires low maintenance. This paper aims to investigate the effect of different working tube designs on the performance of vortex tube using a numerical approach. These designs include 1° converging, 1° diverging and a straight tube associated with 16° bend shape. For this purpose, a test rig was fabricated to validate the standard model of vortex tube experimentally. It was found that cold stream temperature dropped as the inlet pressure increased and reached 273 K at 5 bars. Further investigations were performed via computational fluid dynamics approach using compressible air flow model in Fluent code. Based on results, 1° diverging bend tube shows the highest performance and overall COP has been increased by 40 % of the standard model.

Index Terms- Computational Fluid Dynamics, Vortex Tube, Bend Angle, Thermal Separation, Cold Mass Fraction