Quick and empirical correlations for refrigerant pressure drop in mobile air conditioning system evaporators

Abstract

In heat exchanger design and simulation, a precise refrigerant pressure drop prediction is difficult because of limited correlation's accuracy. In the present paper, several quick and accurate empirical correlations for refrigerant pressure drop of the typical evaporators (laminated plate evaporator and minichannel parallel flow (MCPF) evaporator) used in mobile air conditioning (MAC) system were proposed. A factor which was related with the refrigerant mass flow rate, thermodynamic properties and refrigerant status was introduced. The types of evaporator and refrigerant were considered in the correlations which were available under typical MAC evaporator application conditions. The analysis results showed the refrigerant pressure drops were implied in a linear relationship with the proposed factor. The predicted data agreed with the experimental data very well. For laminated palate evaporators, the average deviations were 1.8% and 0.7% for R134a and R1234yf, respectively. For MCPF evaporator, the average deviations were 4.5% and 0.6% for R134a and R1234yf, respectively.