| Summary: | In recent years carbon dioxide (CO2, R-744)has moved to the foreground as an environmentally friendly alternative to commonly used CFCs and HFCs, which are being phased out due to its high ozone depleting and global warming potentials. R-744 is not only environmentally friendly but due to its unique properties, it is also ideally suited for the use in heat pump water heaters. High cycle efficiencies are achievable even at high hot water temperatures. The high cycle efficiency not only leads to energy and cost savings but also ties in with the drive for implementation of energy saving measures in South Africa. It is therefore paramount to continue development and implementation of R-744 in heat pump water heaters. Optimizing the cycle efficiency is only possible if detailed component simulation models, taking these unique properties of R-744 into account, are available.
The purpose of this study therefore was to develop a detail simulation model of a concentric tube-in-tube water-to-refrigerant evaporator, as well as a fin-and-tube air-to-refrigerant evaporator model.
Data from the North-West University R-744 heat pump test bench were used to verify the tube-in-tube evaporator simulation model. The discrepancies in the cooling capacity between the simulation and test bench can be attributed to the presence of lubricant in the system.The fin-and-tube model was verified by testing it against the NIST program EVAP-COND (NIST 2010). Overall there was good agreement between the results of the two programs, with EVAP-COND predicting a lower cooling capacity(6% to 14%) and and a higher pressure refrigerant pressure drop (30% to 50%).
It was found that both the heat transfer correlation of Jung et al. (1989) and the pressure drop correlation of Choi et al. (1999) are able to predict the experimental values accurately and are valid for use in both the evaporator models developed.
To demonstrate the use of the detail evaporator fin-and-tube model, an evaluation of the different tube geometries, commercially available in South Africa, for use with R-744 fin-and-tube evaporators was done. For a fin-and-tube evaporator it was found that the most cost effective option is to use ⅜" (10.05 mm)copper tubes and the least effective is " (12.6 mm) stainless steel tubes. === Thesis (MIng (Mechanical Engineering))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013.
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