Performance investigation on refrigeration and air conditioning systems with multi-evaporator

Refrigeration and air conditioning (RAC) system Multi-evaporator structures are popularly applied in for efficient temperature and humidity control of multi-zone in underground buildings, light commercial and residential buildings, cold stores, et al., which can also attract and/or release heat from and/or to renewable sources. The increase on the system complexity makes it difficult to analyze the performance and to optimize its design and control. In this paper, a novel method, performance chart, is presented for the performance analysis and system optimization of multi-evaporator and RAC systems. The performance chart is generated by superimposing the performance curve of different evaporators of the indoor unit (IDUs), which can be applied to describe the performance of the whole RAC system by superimposing with the performance curve of outdoor units (ODUs). Based on the performance chart, the performance of multi-evaporator systems are analyzed at different conditions such as varying indoor temperatures, varying indoor air volumes, and varying IDUs' capacities. The performance chart can give the reasonable and quantitative trends of multi-evaporator RAC system performance and guide the system design. These results showed that the performance chart can be used as a convenient tool for performance analysis and system optimization of multi-evaporator RAC systems.