Flow and Heat Transfer Around an Air-Cooled Coil Condenser

In this paper, flow and heat transfer around a compact coil condenser of a built-in refrigerator was studied numerically for various pitch values between the coils. Condenser in a housing was assumed to be cooled by an exhaust fan. This configuration is in accordance with a number of practical applications. Flow inside the housing was assumed turbulent. The fluid was assumed to be incompressible and Newtonian. The governing equations were solved by a computational fluid mechanics simulation software. The results show that when the pitch between the coils is increased, the heat transfer performance increases significantly. An increase of 27% in heat transfer rate is seen when the pitch value is increased from 6mm to 10mm. Further increase in the pitch value from 10mm to 12mm provides an extra 9% increase in heat transfer rate. As the increase in pitch value also increases condenser length, the pitch value of 10mm can be considered an optimum value when there is a strong restriction on space in chassis region. © 2015, Avestia Publishing. All rights reserved.