Commissioning and verification of compressed air yield on the hydraulic air compressor demonstrator

The completion of the hydraulic air compressor (HAC) demonstrator at Dynamic Earth in
\nSudbury, Ontario marks the beginning of a series of research activities to increase the efficiency
\nof compressed air production and build confidence in future commercial applications. Before any
\nproper experiments could be conducted on the HAC Demonstrator a series of commissioning
\nactivities and testing was completed to i) calibrate the instruments, ii) check and understand losses,
\nand iii) verify, or otherwise, some of the assumptions made during the system design.
\nThe practical work associated with this master’s thesis included the development of a human
\nmachine interface (HMI) to allow for automated control of the HAC. Instrumentation and control
\nequipment was installed and routed to a control panel providing conditioned power and routes for
\nsignals. Within the control panel, these are digitised and transmitted using TCP/ IP/ MODBUS
\nprotocol, operating over a TopServer (Software toolbox, 2009) OPC backbone. The OPC Client
\ntoolbox in MATLAB was adopted to interface with the OPC Server, and MATLAB’s App
\nDesigner adopted for authoring the HMI. All I/O functionality is thus routed to MATLAB in which
\na PID control loop was established between the HAC separator water level and the HAC’s
\ncompressed air motorized globe valve. Thus, a reliable, flexible, scientific control interface and
\ndata storage infrastructure was established for this novel compression plant as part of the master’s
\nwork. The HAC Demonstrator can now effectively run a variety of experiments while recording a
\nwide range of data for analysis. To date, a series of 90 benchmark tests for compressor performance
\nhave been completed in a systematic manner on the demonstrator to create a database of real HAC
\noperating conditions. This thesis thus represents the first formal publication of the HAC
\nDemonstrator’s complete performance under the baseline operating conditions. 
\nPrevious predictions of the compressed air yield and efficiency of a HAC of this size have been
\nmade by Millar (2014), upgraded to weakly couple solubility loss by Pavese et al. (2016) and
\nrefined using Young’s (2017) detailed coupling of solubility and psychrometric phenomena. The
\npredictions made by these models have been tested. The 1D hydrodynamic solubility models also
\npredicted a small beneficial ‘airlift’ effect on compressor performance, due to exsolution of
\nformerly dissolved compressed gas, that has also been reported upon.
\nOne unexpectedly important factor that has been found to affect HAC performance that was not
\nanticipated in any of the models included the absolute surface roughness of rubber lined pipe, in
\ncomparison to that of bare steel pipe. High precision experiments are reported upon that have
\nproduced reliable values for absolute surface roughness for rubber lining materials, that have now
\nbeen adopted in the HAC models, and may be adopted more widely too. The occurrence of
\ndetrainment, water jet-free fall and air re-entrainment is speculated upon as the source of
\npreviously unreported loss in the air-water mixing process, based on pressure profiling
\nobservations undertaken over the complete performance envelope of the Dynamic Earth HAC
\nDemonstrator.

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