Search

In this paper experimental investigations are presented to compare the air-side thermal and hydraulic performance of a conventional finned-tube evaporator coil with spiral finned coil for a commercial freezing unit. The spiral finned-tube coil is utilized with a novel defrost system that reduce the energy consumption during the defrosting cycles. An experimental setup is designed and built to measure the cooling capacity and pressure drop of both coils. The results show that the pressure drop across the spiral finned-tube coil is lower than that of conventional finned-tube coil by about 60%. However, the spiral finned-tube coil has a lower cooling capacity by about 25% at the same air flow rate due to lower surface area and heat transfer coefficient. It is expected that this lower cooling capacity will be compensated by higher air flow due to lower pressure drop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]