Experimental Study of Domestic Refrigerator Performance Improvement with Evaporative Condenser

Abstract

Evaporation of defrosted water in household refrigerators and condenser waste heat utilization has been reported by many researchers but limited literature is available on the study of evaporative cooling in domestic refrigerators (condenser waste heat utilization for defrost water evaporation) with helical coil heat exchangers. This paper is concerned with evaluating domestic refrigerator performance by employing an evaporative helical coil heat exchanger before hot wall condenser which is utilized for evaporation of defrost water and reducing the superheated refrigerant temperature to condensing temperature to reduce the condenser load and improve the overall performance of a domestic refrigerator. Results show that evaporative cooling increases COP of the system by 25.3%, reduces the energy consumption of the refrigerator by 7.3% and the compressor run time by 10.6%. These experimental results also revealed that using two different thermal conductivity tube materials for evaporative helical coil condenser (Copper tube and Zinc coated steel tube) provided with less wall thickness (0.2[Formula: see text]mm) PVC coating results in good agreement for the same evaporation rate of defrosted water.