ENHANCING THE PERFORMANCE OF EVAPORATIVE SPRAY COOLING IN AIR CYCLE REFRIGERATION AND AIR-CONDITIONING TECHNOLOGY

The phase out of CFC refrigerants and the concern over their proposed replacements, HFC, has led to a reassessment of many natural refrigera tion technologies including air cycle. It is recognised that to fulfil the full potential of air cycle technology, improvements in system en ergy consumption must be made. One area where it is believed that sign ificant energy savings can be made is the use of evaporative spray coo ling. This paper reports preliminary results of a project aimed at inv estigating and enhancing the performance of evaporative spray cooling. Initially, the performance of five different types of atomiser was ex amined under varying operating conditions. From these tests it was pos sible to identify the most appropriate atomiser for the application an d carry out further tests to determine the effect of other parameters such as water temperature and atomiser location. A system model has be en used to interpret the findings of these tests to see how the energy performance of an actual air cycle system is affected by evaporative spray cooling. Further tests must be carried out before a definitive u nderstanding of evaporative spray cooling is reached. These are expoun ded in this paper. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.