New Centrifugal Compressor for Water Steam

Environmental protection has been gaining more and more importance. Following this trend, the Institut fu¨r Luft- und Ka¨ltetechnik Dresden gGmbH (ILK) has designed a new chiller using water as natural refrigerant. Because of the special thermodynamic properties of water steam, the heart of the chiller, the centrifugal compressor, must be designed differently than the usual compressors used for refrigerating machines. This paper describes the compressor, its characteristic field and the test facilities used to investigate and optimize the compressor.