Investigation on Ejector Design for CO2 Heat Pump Applications Using Dymola

Metsue, Antoine [UCL] Bartosiewicz, Yann [UCL] Poncet, Sébastien [Université de Sherbrooke]

In this paper, the Dymola modelling tool is used to study the influence of ejector design onto the whole heat pump cycle working with carbon dioxide. The cycle is built using the components provided by the TIL Modelica library. It is found that the ejector models in TIL are quite limited, namely by their inability to properly capture the on-design plateau and rapid decrease in performance in off-design operation. Therefore, an in-house state-of-the-art ejector model, originally developed in Python, is implemented as a Dymola object. This model is then calibrated onto CO2 experimental data. The operation of a simple CO2 heat pump system is investigated, with focus on the ejector sizing at fixed geometry. It is found that there exists an ejector size that maximises the COP of the cycle. Furthermore, critical ejector pressure is not reached at this optimum COP point; the ejector is operating well under the on-design regime.