• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.240-253
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• 1996

The refrigeration cycle of automobile air-conditioners is simulated in an effort to provide a computational tool for optimum thermodynamic design. In the simulation, thermodynamic and heat transfer analysis was performed for the four major components : evaporator, condenser, compressor, and expansion valve. Effectiveness-NTU method was used for modeling both evaporator and condenser. The evaporator was divied into many subgrids and simultaneous cooling and dehumidifying analysis was performed for each grid to predict the performance accurately. Blance equations were used to model the compressor instead of using the compressor map. The performance of each component was checked against the measured data with CFC-12. Then, all the components were combined to yield the total system performance. Predicted cycle points were compared against the measured data with HFC-134a and the deviation was found to be less than 5% for all data. Finally, the system model was used to predict the performance of CFC-12 and HFC-134a for comparison. The results were very reasonable as compared to the trend deduced from the measured data.