A liquefied petroleum gas gasification system utilizing solar thermal energy

Abstract

Liquefied petroleum gas (abbreviated as LPG) is still an important source of residential gas in China due to its advantages. LPG gasfier is the key equipment of the LPG center supplement system. Traditional LPG vaporizer mainly depends on electric heating as its heat source, which leads to high energy cost and can not meet the demand of energy conservation policy. A new LPG gasification system utilizing solar thermal energy has been designed in this paper. This system uses hot water produced by a solar water heating system as vaporization heat source and uses an electric heater as assisted heat source. In order to understand the running conditions and the thermodynamic performances of the whole system better, this paper presents several thermal-physical models. The paper chooses a community with 1000 households in Beijing as a subject, and selects one sunny day in November which has minimal average hours of sunshine to study the LPG gasification system using solar thermal energy. The result shows that the system is stable on the aspect of thermal performance and is efficient in electricity-saving. In addition, the economy efficiency of the LPG gasification system with solar energy is analyzed by using the cost-effective analysis. The result expresses that the new system is an efficient, reliable and environmentally friendly alternative to the traditional LPG vaporization system using electricity only.