High-Performance Air Cooling Condenser With Liquid-Vapor Separation

In this investigation, an innovative idea was introduced to design a new kind of high-performance air cooling condensers. This kind of condenser functions to automatically separate liquid from gas and makes condensation always occur in droplet and unsteady thin film condensation mode everywhere in the whole condenser, which results in very high average heat transfer coefficient. An introduction is presented to describe the basic principle and structure of the novel heat exchanger technology, particularly the understanding from the fundamental experimental investigations. Furthermore, a series of experiments was conducted to validate the high performance of an air-conditioning system with an innovative condenser. Though heat transfer area of the condenser was about 37% less, the performance was as good as or even better than that of the original one.