Orbiting compressor for residential air-conditioners

A new type of compressor, called an orbiting compressor, is introduced in this paper. The orbiting compressor is characterized by an orbiting piston, and the piston or orbiter consists of a circular base plate and a ring type vane protruding vertically from the base plate. The orbiter is made to orbit in an annular space formed between two concentric circular walls via an Oldham-ring mechanism, producing two sealed gas pockets on both sides of the vane wrap with a 180° phase difference. This operating mechanism leads to alternating compression and discharge processes, which results in low torque variation. The orbiting compressor has been designed for an R410A residential air conditioner with a cooling capacity of 10.0 kW. The performance of the orbiting compressor model has been analytically investigated, where the volumetric, adiabatic and mechanical efficiencies were calculated to be 94.8%, 90.4% and 93.4%, respectively for the ARI condition. The EER was estimated to be about 10.86 with a motor efficiency of 89%.