Abstract
The effect of surface contact angle on the behavior of frost formation in a fin-tube heat exchanger is investigated experimentally. It is shown that both heat exchangers with hydrophilic and hydrophobic surfaces appear to have a better thermal performance than bare aluminium heat exchanger, but the improvements are very small. There is a little increase in the amount of the frost deposited onto the heat exchanger with both hydrophilic and hydrophobic surface. However, the effect of contact angle on the frost density is observed ; the frost with high density forms on the heat exchanger with hydrophilic surface ; and the frost with low density is deposited onto the heat exchanger with hydrophobic surface when compared with the frost deposited onto the heat exchanger with bare aluminium surface. This may be attributed to the fact that the shape of water droplets which condense on the surface of heat exchanger at the early stage of frosting varies with contact angle, and thus makes a difference on the structure of frost formation. From the experiments with different relative humidity of inlet air, it is shown that the variations of operating parameter make no influence on the effect of surface contact angle on the frosting behavior in the heat exchanger.
