Paper presented to the 10th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Florida, 14-16 July 2014.
In this study, the effects of parameters as mini channel heat exchanger geometry, refrigerant change and capillary length have been investigated experimentally to improve the cooling system performance and decrease energy consumption. The Design of Experiments (DOE) technique which is a six sigma method has been used to determine simultaneously the individual and combined effects of parameter that could affect the mini channel condenser performance. Energy consumption tests were conducted by considering the same temperatures, which are 5ºC for fresh food compartment and -18ºC freezer compartment, at 25ºC ambient temperature. For the analysis of the results, general linear model method was chosen to identify the effectiveness of the parameters. According to the results, mini channel type and refrigerant charge that are the individual parameters and capillary length-refrigerant charge combined effects are effective but the capillary length and the other combined effects came out to be less effective one. Experiments showed that lowest energy consumption and best cooling performance are performed by shorter capillary length and minimum refrigerant charge.
