Modeling of condensation heat transfer of refrigerant mixture in micro-fin tubes

Abstract

This paper presents a new refrigerant-mixture model for condensation in micro-fin tubes. The new refrigerant-mixture model is developed based on a theoretical analysis of turbulent film condensation inside smooth tubes. Several modifications have been implemented in the original smooth-tube model to account for mass transfer thermal resistance between the liquid and vapor phases. The new condensation model is compared with a set of around 200 experimental data points for refrigerant mixtures. The comparison shows that the new model is capable of producing consistent prediction results with a mean absolute deviation (MAD) less than 22% for most of the available data sets. The MAD values obtained with the new model are lower compared to the results obtained using another models.