Nominal condensing capacity and performance evaluation of evaporative condenser

Heat transfer performance of an evaporative condenser is closely related to the type of refrigerants used and its operating conditions. Thus establishing a method to measure the condensing capacity of a modular product is necessary. This paper proposes saturated water vapor under a pressure of 20 kPa as the benchmark working fluid to evaluate the thermal performance of the evaporative condenser. When the same evaporative condenser is used for condensing other refrigerants, the corresponding condensation ability could be obtained according to the change of the thermal property parameters in working conditions. The verification was conducted according to experimental data obtained when the water vapor and ammonia vapor were condensed respectively in the same evaporative condenser. Results showed that the calculation of the heat transfer area deviation is less than 8% when the ratio of the superheated and sub-cooling sections is less than 8%. According to the current procedural verification method, a contrast test-bed is designed to verify the design of an unknown refrigerant condensation.