A new modeling procedure for circuit design and performance prediction of evaporator coils using CO2 as refrigerant

The replacement of environmentally damaging synthetic refrigerants due to their ODP or GWI potential by natural refrigerants such as CO2 is now up in the research agenda. Moreover, current energy supply concerns make of efficiency another first priority issue to dictate new stringent design criteria for industrial and commercial equipment. Heat exchangers are the most important components in refrigeration systems where they are used as evaporators or condensers and their design and operation have a considerable impact on overall system performance. Hence, it is important to better understand their thermal and hydrodynamic behaviour in order to improve their design and operation. Numerical simulation represents a very efficient tool for achieving this objective. In this paper, a new modeling approach, accounting for the heat transfer the hydrodynamics of the problem and intended to predict the dynamic behaviour of a refrigeration coil under dry conditions is proposed. A related FORTRAN program was developed, allowing the study of a large range of complex refrigerant circuit configurations. The equations describing these aspects are strongly coupled, and their decoupling is reached by using an original method of resolution. Circuits may have several inlets, outlets, bifurcations and feed one or several other tubes inlets. The coil was subdivided into several elementary control volumes and its analysis provided detailed information in X, Y and Z directions. Validation was performed with data from a CO2 secondary refrigeration loop test bench built in CanmetENERGY Laboratories. These data were predicted satisfactorily over the operating range corresponding to refrigeration applications. Exemplary simulations were then performed on an evaporator typically employed in supermarkets, showing the effect of circuiting on operation and performance. Even though circuiting is common practice in refrigeration this simulation shows that care must be exercised in making the selection. A two-circuit configuration was chosen for analysis in this investigation. In terms of capacity and heat transfer, it was shown that the two circuits were well balanced in terms of pressure drop and heat transfer capacity. Low CO2 pressure drop resulted in reduced temperature glide as compared to a single circuit.