Adaptation of Sub-cool Condenser for an Air Conditioning System Employing an Internal Heat Exchanger 2020-28-0026

Recently, the use of air conditioning systems is growing rapidly due to increasing global temperatures. Considering enormous growth in the application of the air conditioning system, there is an urgent need to improve design, performance, and efficiency thereof. For example, the air conditioning systems that are being used these days are required to provide improved efficiency per unit of power consumed, and they are also required to have a smaller form factor as compared to conventional air conditioning systems. Therefore, a lot of modern air conditioning systems employ components such as internal heat exchanger, thermal expansion valves and forth to improve their performance while having a small form factor. Adaptation of internal heat exchanger provides additional heat transfer between the high temperature sub-cooled liquid from the condenser and super-heated cold vapor from the evaporator, which can reduce the inlet vapor quality to the evaporator and potentially increase the system heat capacity and coefficient of performance.

In this study a condenser is adapted to be used for an air conditioning system employing an internal heat exchanger. Wherein the condenser sub-cool area is in a optimized range with respect to frontal condenser area. Also the effect of IHX on the sub-cooling part of the condenser has been analyzed and optimized accordingly as per the system requirement. R134a has been used as refrigerant for the analysis. The sizing of sub-cool portion of condenser inline of internal heat exchanger capacity for a given system results up to 10% improvement in the coefficient of performance of AC system.