Performance of a condenser of an automotive air conditioner with maldistribution of inlet air-Simulation studies and its experimental validation

To assess the thermal-hydraulics of a condenser of a typical automotive air conditioning system with maldistribution of intake air, a comprehensive investigation has been taken up. The investigation comprises both experiments and numerical simulations. A special purpose software, CoilDesigner is used to simulate the heat transfer and fluid dynamics of the multiple channel micro-tube air to refrigerant crossflow condenser. While experimentally the overall performance of the condenser is studied by creating blockages of different types and extents in the inlet air path, simulation results provide the spatial variation of pressure, temperature, heat transfer coefficient, and quality on the tube side, in addition to the overall performance for each of the cases. The simulation results clearly bring out the spatial change in the transport parameters due to a typical blockage. One can compare the effective use of the exchanger area of the heat exchanger for an unblocked and a typically blocked case. The simulation also gives a very reliable prediction of the overall performance as recorded by the experiment.