The Smart Condenser Design for an Automotive Air-Conditioning System

摘要

Traditional condenser has fixed configuration of refrigerant flow tubes after it has been produced.Therefore,the automotive air conditioning system could not be operated at optimal conditions all the time since refrigerant flow rate and air flow rate are varied at different driving patterns.A variable configuration of refrigerant flow was proposed in this paper.The tube numbers in each passage can be varied according to the driving condition as total number of refrigerant tubes is fixed.A theoretical model for the condenser of automotive air condition-ing system was developed in this paper.Simulations were conducted to evaluate the effect of varying tube numbers on the performance of condenser.The optimal configuration for each driving pattern was then obtained with this model.Results of simulation demonstrated that condenser tube arrangement with (11,10,8,7) in lower refrigerant flow rate and (7,8,10,11) in higher refrigerant flow rate have the greatest cooling capacity for the widest operation condition.Varying the number of tubes in each passage would decrease cooling capacity.In this study,an increase of 5％ in cooling capacity can be reached if optimal operation can be maintained in all driving patterns in 5ms-1 air velocity.A four-way reverse valve can be used to change the refrigerant flow direction such that the optimal configuration of flow tubes can be reached at all driving conditions.