An Experimental Study on the Performance of Inverter Heat Pump with a Variation of Frequency and Capillary Size

An experimental study was performed to investigate the optimum cycle of an inverter heat pump as a function of frequency. The performance of the inverter heat pump with the rated cooling capacity of 4,141 W(3,550kcal/h) was measured with a variation of frequency, indoor and outdoor temperature, and length of capillary tube in the psychrometric test room. As a base case, the inverter heat pump with the standard capillary length of l,000mm(optimum size for the frequency of 60Hz) and ASHRAE Test condition "A" was tested by varying frequency from 30Hz to 80Hz. Then, the optimum cycles were investigated by varying the length of capillary tube at each frequency level of 30, 60 and 80Hz. Based on the experimental data, the change of system characteristics between the optimum and the base case were analyzed for each selected frequency level. Generally, for low frequency level(30Hz), the longer length of the capillary tube compared with the standard size showed the higher energy efficiency ratio(EER), while for high frequency level(80Hz) the shorter length of the capillary tube showed the higher EER.