Why doesn’t the vortex tube replace the need for a refriegerant compressor? Does the vortex tube have any practical applications?
The immediate glib answer is it doesn’t replace compressors because it requires a source of compressed air (or other gas), ie. a compressor somewhere, either in real time or to produce a tank of compressed air.
I imagine by the time you factor in the energy used to compress the air, standard refrigeration units are more efficient.
The Wikipedia article confirms this, actually:
Vortex tubes are common in industrial use. There are a lot of places where really nasty things are being manufactured and something that requires only air is definately a good thing. They are downright cheap to operate if you’ve already got compressed air in the area too, so sometimes they are put in just for cost reasons.
Vortex tubes aren’t going to replace compressors because they are really freaking loud and annoying.
In Frederick Pohl’s novel The Merchant’s War they use BIG vortex tubes to help terraform Venus. It seems like not a good idea to me – you need huge compressors for all that air, you’re throwuing away precious atmosphere into space (they vent the “hot” side off the planet), and if there’s one thing those tubes don’t need, it’s to become even LOUDER.
If they’re the things I’m thinking of… A mechanic friend from a few years back bought one and used it as a “choke tester.” I assume he still uses it as such, on the rare occasion.
I think they aren’t used for large applications like air conditioning because their efficiency is poor (they need lots of energy). They’re used for small, point-cooling applications because they are convenient. The same might be said for peltier effect devices. However the two devices are convenient in different ways. Vortex tubes need nothing but compressed air, and throw their cooling effect towards an object without requiring any attachment, so they’re convenient for cooling a part while you machine it, for example. Peltier effect heat pumps seem to conduct heat from cold objects into warm ones, so for example a heat-sensitive radiation sensor mounted in a vacuum can be kept at -100 F this way for an instrument that uses only electrical power.