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A newly released Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Technology Institute (ARTI) report says that replacing traditional round tube heat exchangers with flattened tube technology may enable the air-conditioning industry to provide comfort cooling using a new refrigerant, while increasing efficiency but not the system’s size.
The geometry of a flattened tube, compared with the traditional round tube heat exchanger, reportedly allows for improved heat transfer and thermal performance, increased coil and overall unit efficiencies, substantial refrigerant charge reduction, and more compact and reduced coil size.
According to ARTI, flattened tube heat exchangers have received a lot of attention as a possible replacement to traditional round tubes, but until now, little research has been done on the thermal-hydraulic performance of flattened tubes under wet, dry and frosted conditions. The Arlington, Virginia, U.S.-based organization says its research report, titled “An Assessment of the State-of-the-Art and Potential Design Improvements, for Flat-tube Heat Exchangers in Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Applications,” addresses the fundamental science needed to allow the air-conditioning industry to engineer products using this technology.
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