Abstract
The flow and heat/mass transfer in the falling-film of a heat exchanger can be influenced by the motion of the surrounding refrigerant vapor. In this study, the effect of the vapor flow direction on the absorption heat transfer has been investigated for a falling-film helical coil which is frequently used as the absorber of ammonia/water absorption refrigerators. The experiments were carried out for different solution concentration. The heat and mass transfer performance was measured for both parallel and counter-current flow. The effect of vapor flow on the heat and mass transfer is found to be increased with decreasing solution concentration. In the experiments with low solution concentration, whose vapor specific volume is great, the counter-current flow of vapor resulted in uneven distribution of falling-film and reduced the heat transfer performance of the absorber. The direction of the vapor flow hardly affected the thermal performance as the solution concentration became stronger since the specific volume of the ammonia/water vapor was much smaller than that of the water vapor.
