Sponsors: Oklahoma
Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology, Quantum
Construction Technologies, Inc., and the York
Unitary Products Group
Description:
The proposed project will consist of a joint effort
between the York Advanced Technology Group and the Building Environmental and
Thermal Systems Research Group (BETSRG) in the Department of Mechanical and
Aerospace Engineering at Oklahoma State University.
The two groups bring complementary expertise and resources to the project
and will work closely together in a synergistic research environment to develop
innovative unitary air conditioning equipment that uses advanced and natural
refrigerants.
Over the last decade
refrigerant research has focused on the thermodynamic and kinematic properties
of binary and ternary zeotropic blends of HFCs and, more recently, on possible
applications of natural refrigerants. Experimental
research is currently underway to determine the transport and heat transfer
properties of these refrigerants in the components of the vapor compression
cycle. In addition, numerical
analysis and simulation have been employed to use experimentally determined
refrigerant properties in the analysis of cyclic performance under various
conditions. However, no work has
been done to extend the current research to the synthetic development of
innovative systems that use advanced and natural refrigerants.
To achieve this objective a simulation environment must be developed that
couples cutting-edge vapor compression component models with realistic transient
environmental boundary conditions and detailed physical and transport property
information for advanced refrigerants.
This research advances the
state-of-the-art in three significant ways.
First, cutting-edge component technologies will be modeled by the
research team and linked to the simulation environment.
Second, heat-balance based models of environmental boundary conditions
for enclosed HVAC equipment will be developed and experimentally validated.
Finally, existing physical and transport property data for advanced and
natural refrigerants will be linked to the simulation environment.
In most cases, this will require the development of correlations that are
suitable for system simulation. Component
models, some of which will represent new and emerging technologies, refrigerant
property correlations and environmental boundary models will be linked to an
existing simulation engine that supports a dynamically variable simulation time
step.
The proposed research also
achieves the main objective of a Phase I Applied Research project by
developing the R&D capabilities of the York Unitary Products Group (UPG).
The result of this project will place a synthetic design research tool in
the hands of the Unitary Products Group. This
tool will greatly expand the York’s capacity for technological innovation.
Its development is not only timely, but also critical to the development
of new product lines at the Oklahoma City facility.
Existing steady state cycle simulations cannot be used in design
applications, and the “trial and error” method used successfully for
incremental improvement of existing designs cannot be successfully used to
design new cycles for advanced refrigerants.
A synthetic design and analysis research tool is the critical “missing
link” in UPG’s R&D chain. The
research program outlined in this proposal provides this missing link.
Keywords: air-conditioning,
energy, ozone, refrigerants, simulation
Product Description:
The
seven York UPG product lines can be broadly described as air-conditioner systems
operating on a standard vapor compression cycle.
These systems, which currently use low level ozone-depleting
refrigerants, range in capacity from 1.5 to 40 tons of cooling.
The new products will be designed utilizing the simulation technology
developed under this proposal and will include state-of the art components and
alternate/natural refrigerants.
The
1.5 to 5 ton residential air-conditioning unit shown in Figure 24.1 is an
example of one of the seven product lines targeted for the application of
the new technology.
Residential
A/C Unit
Publications:
Nathan
Weber's M.S. Thesis
Iu,
I., Bansal, P.K., Rees, S.J., Fisher, D.E., Weber, N.A. and Spitler, J.D. Energy
efficiency analysis of a unitary heat pump system. Proc. of International
Conference on Building Systems and Facilities Management - Integrating
Innovations and Technologies for a Built Environment, Singapore, October 2003.
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