In a refrigerator and an air conditioner, it is a well-known fact that the contamination of lubricant into a pure refrigerant has a great influence on the heat transfer characteristics and two-phase flow behavior at the condenser and evaporator. However, up to now, in the most of heat exchanger design, the refrigerant has been regarded as a pure one.
On the other hand, a recent condenser tube diameter tends to be fine to overcome the various demands on the compactness and the high performance, especially required for the alternative refrigerant. Unfortunately, quantitative studies of the tube less than 6 mm in diameter were insufficient, moreover, only few studies have been made including the effect of the oil contamination on the condensation heat transfer.
In this study, we employed HFC134a as a refrigerant and PAG-oil as a lubricant and experiments with a flat tube and three kinds of circular tube which has different diameters were made. By using the flow visualization data, a new flow pattern map being applicable both of a pure and oil-lubricant mixture was proposed. Moreover, by examining the local heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop, the most sensitive flow pattern affected by contamination of lubricant was specified and the detailed discussion on the quantitative effect of oil contamination on condensation heat transfer including the effect of tube geometry was carried out.
Finally, based on these results, new correlation for heat transfer and pressure drop was suggested, and it predicted our data successfully well up to a mass flux of 150kg/(m
2•s.)
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