Temperature and Pressure Drop Analysis of Automobile Minichannel Condenser using CFD

Abstract

Refrigeration and air conditioning plays a vital role in domestic and industrial heating, cooling, refrigerating and ventilation but they are contributing to ozone layer depletion and global warming due to unfriendly refrigerants and consume 33% of the world energy. The condenser is an important component of the vapor compression system which contained 30% of the refrigerant charge. The versatile one ton of refrigeration system is designed, developed for testing minichannel condenser for different condenser temperature and pressure by providing artificial condenser compartment with three air heaters of 2.2 kW capacity each with a multispeed condenser fan for controlling air velocity. Thus, the condensation temperature is reduced by 2 to 3°C due to its special geometry, passes provided, efficient cooling and the coefficient of performance increased by 10 to 15% for condensation temperature varying from 40 to 55°C whereas evaporation temperature varies from -10 to +15°C. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation for different sections of the minichannel condenser such as a single minichannel, single tube with 10 minichannels, first, second, third, fourth passes with varying tubes and entire condenser with all four passes for different inlet and exit temperature are performed using ANSYS FLUENT-20 CFD turbulence models and validated with the experimental results. The pressure and temperature counters for all the sections are studied and plotted. It is found that the temperature difference between experimental and CFD results are within ±15% for all the simulations along the condenser.