Refrigerant Flow Distribution Characteristics of Vehicle MiniChannel Evaporator

Abstract:

In this paper, taking the whole parallel flow minichannel evaporator including four processes as the reach model, study the effects of structure factors (the relative position of the import and export pipe with the header; the combined altitudes between flat tube and header) on evaporator flow distribution. Introducing three dimensionless parameters (P′in, P′out, H) to indicate that three relative positional relationship, the calculation results show that when P′in=0.591, P′out=0.402, H=0.239, the uniformity of the refrigerant flow distribution is preferably.Considering the influence of the three structural parameters, an optimized structure was obtained, making the uniformity of flow distribution greatly improved, unevenness decreased 20% than the initial structure.

Key words:parallel flow minichannel evaporator; refrigerant flow distribution; uniformity; structure optimization