Effects of Relative Humidity on the Evaporator Pressure Drop

It is well known that some key parameters, such as evaporating temperature, refrigerant mass flow rate, face velocity and inlet air temperature, have significant influence on the evaporator performance. However performance studies related to a humid environment have been very scarce. It is demonstrated that the refrigerant mass flow rate, heat flux, water condensing rate and air outlet temperature of the evaporator significantly increase with air inlet relative humidity. As the air inlet relative humidity increases, the latent and total heat transfer rates increase, but the sensible heat transfer rate decreases. The purpose of this study is to provide experimental data on the effect of air inlet relative humidity on the air and refrigerant side pressure drop characteristics for a slit fin-tube heat exchanger. Experiments were carried out under the conditions of inlet refrigerant saturation temperature of 7 $^{\circ}C$ and mass flux varied from 150 to 250 kg/$m^2$s. The condition of air was dry bulb temperature of 27$^{\circ}C$, air Velocity Varied from 0.38 to 1.6 m/s. Experiments Showed that air Velocity decreased 8.7% on 50% of relative humidity 40% of that at degree of superheat of 5$^{\circ}C$, which resulted that pressure drop of air and refrigerant was decreased 20.8 and 8.3% for 50% of relative humidity as compared to 40%, respectively.

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