Abstract
The present work is aimed to reduce the compressor load in a domestic air conditioning system, by introducing a shell-and-coil type heat exchanger as an intercooler. The intercooler uses initially a binary mixture of ethylene glycol:water at 30:70 ratio as a shell-side base fluid and later uses nanofluids with Al2O3 nanoparticles of different volume concentrations. The coefficient of performance (COP) of the system was estimated at different shell-side fluid flow rates of 1, 1.5 and 2 LPM. COP was found to increase with the decrease in the refrigerant temperature at the compressor inlet, due to the reduction in the compressor work input. A highest increment in the COP of around 31 % was observed for the base fluid and 49.32 % was observed for the 0.75 % nanofluid with a flow rate of 2 LPM compared with the case without intercooler. An appreciable reduction in power consumption of 12.24 % was also observed.
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Abbreviations
- COP:
-
Coefficient of performance
- NF:
-
Nanofluid
- BF:
-
Base Fluid
- IC:
-
Intercooler
- SC-HEX:
-
Shell-and-coil heat exchanger
- I:
-
Electric current
- m ref :
-
Mass flow rate, kg/s
- LPM:
-
Liter per minute
- c:
-
Compressor
- p:
-
Pump
- f:
-
Fan
- ref:
-
Refrigerant
- 1:
-
Compressor inlet
- 2:
-
Compressor outlet
- 3:
-
Intercooler outlet
- 4:
-
Condenser outlet
- 5:
-
Evaporator inlet
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Balaji, N., Kumar, P.S.M., Velraj, R. et al. Experimental Investigations on the Improvement of an Air Conditioning System with a Nanofluid-Based Intercooler. Arab J Sci Eng 40, 1681–1693 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13369-015-1644-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13369-015-1644-7