Potential Of Controlling Subcooling In Residential A/C System

This paper presents effect of subcooling in condenser on efficiency of residential a/c systems. To explore these effects, a system model with detailed component models was developed. The model was validated using experiments conducted on a typical 3 Ton (10.5 kW) system that used R410A. After validation, the model was used to quantitatively study the effect of subcooling in a wide range of operating conditions and several condenser sizes. The model results indicate that subcooling control can improve the system efficiency up to 10% for a given operating condition. Also, the improvements of efficiency are affected by condenser size and load. Higher condenser load and smaller size of condenser result in greater improvements. In addition, this paper presents a control strategy for achieving COP maximizing subcooling as operating conditions change