MOLECULAR DYNAMICS STUDY ON THE EVAPORATION OF ETHANE, PROPANE, AND THEIR MIXED FLUIDS AT THE COPPER SUBSTRATE

JT Wu and F Liang and XL Ao and N Gan and W Xie, THERMAL SCIENCE, 29, 2535-2546 (2025).

DOI: 10.2298/TSCI240819266W

The organic Rankine cycle can harvest the cold energy from liquefied natural gas by using non-azeotropic working fluids. The phase transition is one of the important processes in the thermodynamics cycles. In this paper, the interfacial evaporation characteristics of ethane, propane, and their mixtures were investigated by molecular dynamics simulations. Several properties, including surface tension, diffusion coefficient, interaction energy were analyzed. The results show that the addition of ethane in the mixed working fluid increases the evaporation rate of propane, and the gas-liquid interfacial thermal resistance is relatively large in the total thermal resistance. The pure ethane system has the smallest thermal resistance, surface tension, intermolecular interaction energy and the largest diffusion coefficient, which make the evaporation energy barrier smaller.

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