THERMAL PERFORMANCE OF AIR-COOLED CONDENSING UNITS BY CFD SIMULATION

1Fauziah Bt. Jerai, 2C.S. Ow

Mechanical Engineering Faculty, MARA Institute of Technology, Shah Alam Tel.:016-8121370, E-mail address: 1ziah_rai@yahoo.com, 2iodised@gmail.com

Abstract Split-type air conditioners used in residential or office buildings often have the outdoor condensing units install at the sidewalls. In condominium or apartment buildings, the building reentrants are the most frequent choice of the project team for placing the outdoor air-cooled condensing units. To avoid wastage in electrical energy and unnecessarily heat rejection to the environment, the HVAC engineer and the team should predict the thermal effect on the airconditioners usage from the layout design stage. Additionally, the layout design is also continuously changing before the final design stage and this enhances the difficulty for the team to estimate the actual effect of placing over a hundred outdoor units inside one single re-entrant of a high rise building. In order to tackle this problem, a simulation approach is applied using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), (Phoenics v2008). The energy performances as well as the levels of thermal comfort for the proposed option were evaluated.

Keywords : CFD simulation, split-type units, high-rise building, air-cooled condensers

The use of split-type air-conditioners is a common standard provision in new residential projects of Malaysia. The advantages of the split type units lie in the quiet operation and flexibility in multi-room services [1]. However, installation of more than 50 condensing units of the split-type airconditioning system in a high-rise residential building has become a common problem for architectural design. Building developers often try to squeeze the space to a narrowly confined area due to prohibitive land price while architects usually seek a solution to hide the condensing units at building re-entrant surrounded by walls on three-sides or even four sides based on aesthetic consideration.

The cooling of the outdoor unit has significant effect on the air-conditioner performance. If the on-coil temperature of a condensing unit is raised by 1C, the coefficient of performance (COP) of the systems drops by around 3% [2]. If the temperature remains above 46C for a longer period, it will by design automatically trip because of excessive working refrigerant pressure [3]. The placement of outdoor condensing units in a high-rise building greatly affects the airconditioner performance. Chow et.al [4 & 5] and H. Xue [6] investigated the air-conditioner performance of condensing unit in the confined space. Chow et.al [7] studied the effect of condensing unit layout at building re-entrant on split-type air-conditioner performance. Bojic et.al [8 & 9] applied numerical simulation to flow next to high-rise buildings due to air-conditioner heat rejection whilst Abdollah and Ehsan [10] calculated the effect of distance from the supporting wall on the entrance air temperature and on-coil temperature of condenser installed between two walls. At the layout-design stage, a HVAC engineer often finds it difficult to predict such a thermal effect, say, when four of outdoor units are to be placed inside one confined space [11]. To design an acceptable indoor/outdoor environment, a computer simulation tool is needed that can predict the distributions of thermal comfort and indoor air quality parameters, such as air temperature, velocity, and relative humidity [12 &13]. A popular approach of computational simulations is Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method. The CFD method solves the Navier-Stokes equations for flow either in turbulent or laminar flow.