Small Liquid Warm Design And Development Of The Fuel Heater

Fuel-burned heater is one of the main equipments for vehicle heating in winter. With the fast development of industry of automobile, the market of fuel-burned vehicle heater has gained a great increase in the recent few years. At present, big heaters with more than 10 kW heat output are popular in domestic market and these heaters mainly serve for big buses and military vehicles. However, we rarely find the compact and miniature heater for passenger cars with low heat output in home market while it has been used for many years in foreign countries.Considering lacking of miniature heater, our team designed a new kind of burner-the cone vaporizing burner which is suitable for the small heater. The burner has a cone vaporizing body in which liquid fuel is distributed on a comparatively large surface and is vaporized from it .At the same time, the vaporized fuel gas quickly mixes with the tangent flow. So the fuel and air have a good and fast mixture in the burner, that means a shorter start phase and less soot. There is also a cone shrinking hole in the mid part of the burner which is used for stabilizing flame. Then the fluent and combustion in the burner was simulated and analyzed by utilizing CFD software STAR-CD.Moreover, under the endeavor of our team, we devise a new model of water-warmed vehicle heater with so-called cone vaporizing burner and the corresponding controller. We have made great efforts to simplify the structure of the new vehicle heater and improve its heat efficiency. The new vehicle heater can be regarded as a good model to exploit the domestic and oversea market, and it will be successful. Meanwhile, we have applied for patents on the new product.Finally, many experiments were made with the new vehicle heater and an old one on a performance test bench. The results show that the new vehicle heater has lower resistance to both water and air flow with almost the same heat efficiency. We also find that the inlet water temperature and the ratio of air and fuel have a great effect on the heat efficiency of heaters. But the flux has a little impact on the efficiency. In additional, some changes were made to the test bench. After those improvements the test bench can be adapted for different types of fuel burned vehicle heaters, no matter what it is water-warmed or air-warmed.