Experimental study on performance improvement of a household refrigerator with a flying-wing evaporator

Abstract

In order to improve the performance of a household refrigerator, a flying-wing evaporator (FWE) is to replace the original finned tube evaporator (FTE). Different from the FTE, the fins of the FWE are formed directly on the tube by shoveling movement. Therefore, the FWE has high efficient heat transfer performance due to no thermal contact resistance between the tubes and the fins. According to different combinations of fin pitch and number of tube rows, three different structures of FWE are designed and tested in comparison with the original FTE on a double-door household refrigerator. The results show that the FWE shortens the cooling duration by 0.32 h (9.3%) and reduces the annual energy consumption by 4.28% with a 25% reduction in volume and a 13.5% reduction in refrigerant charge. This study proves that applying a FWE into a household refrigerator instead of the traditional FTE is one of the effective ways to decrease the volume of evaporator, reduce the energy consumption of refrigerator and enhance the effect of food preservation.