A Study of Exhaust Waste Heat Recovery in Internal Combustion Engines

Abstract

This research presents an investigation of an energy recovery solution from exhaust gases in internal combustion based on the heat exchange to distil fresh water from the sea water. Consequently, an optimization of the flow field design of the heat exchanger was performed using the commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. The result of this research showed that the energy recovery performance of the exchanger strictly depends on the engine load, which can reach a value of approximately 33% at the full load condition of the research engine. These results might forecast a future application of the optimized exchanger's flow-field design in automotive waste heat recovery in order to improve the internal combustion engine efficiency.