Prediction of on-coil temperature of condensers installed at tall buildingre-entrant

Split-type air-conditioners that serve an apartment building often have the outdoor condensing units installed at the building re-entrants. Heat energ y released by the condensing units induces a hot air plume which has its te mperature increase all along the path up the building. When the plume reach es the upper floors, its elevated temperature degrades the condenser effici ency and may even interrupt the air-conditioner operation because of high-t emperature cut. At the design stage, air-conditioning practitioners often f ind it very difficult to analyse the condenser performance when working in a cluster. The work requires the expertise of using an air flow simulation/ computation tool to predict the condenser on-coil temperatures. This articl e presents a modelling/computation technique to tackle this problem. Atl ap plication example is quoted to demonstrate the practicability of the approa ch. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.