Performance Improvement of an Air Cooled Air Conditioning System Using an Evaporative Cooled Condenser

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the performance improvement of an air-cooled air conditioning system utilizing an
evaporative cooled condenser. Air-cooled condensers in many refrigeration and air conditioning systems when used in hot climate are
less efficient and have technical, economical, and environmental constraints. As an alternative, the use of evaporative air-cooled
condensers, seem to be a unique option to mitigate the limitations above and improve the energy performance of such systems.
Another advantage of using evaporative air-cooled condensers is to protect the compressor and keep the system working without
interruptions at high outdoor temperatures.To characterize this energy benefit, a model was developed and applied to predict the
performance of a variable refrigerant flow (VRF) system under various ambient air temperatures up to 42 °C using an engineering
equation solver (EES) software. The results show that the application of the evaporative precooled air in an air-cooled condenser has
significant effect on the performance improvement of the air conditioning system. In Khartoum’s hot and dry climate, the rate of
improvement is increased as ambient air temperature increases. It is also found that, compared to an air-cooled condensers system, the
refrigerant effect and the coefficient of performance of evaporative cooled condensers could be increased by 23% and 60%,
respectively. In addition, the compressor work is decreased by 35% followed by a considerable reduction of the operational costs of
the system.