Cross-Fin Heat Exchanger Flow Paths for Balanced Heating and Cooling
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional heat exchangers for air conditioners face challenges in achieving a balance between heating and cooling performance, often compromising one performance to enhance the other.
Innovation Solution
A cross-fin tube heat exchanger with a row structure featuring three or more rows of heat transfer tubes, incorporating coexistent paths that include both parallel and counter-flow portions, allowing for efficient heat exchange during both heating and cooling operations.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If heat transfer tubes are arranged in multiple rows along air flow direction, then heat exchange efficiency is improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
Multiple refrigerant flow path configurations (counter-flow and parallel-flow) are merged into a single integrated heat exchanger structure with three tube rows. This combining approach achieves high heat exchange efficiency through multiple rows while avoiding the complexity of having separate heat exchanger units for different flow configurations
Applied Scientific Principles
This section explains which scientific principles are used to turn an abstract innovation direction into a practical engineering solution.
Function Achieved in This Case
This design improves the balance between heating and cooling performance by optimizing refrigerant flow paths, reducing the decline in one performance while emphasizing the other, and enhancing overall efficiency.
Implementation Method 1
a plurality of heat transfer tubes (15) passing through the plurality of fins (13)
Implementation Method 2
Air which is sucked into a case of the air conditioner exchanges heat with a refrigerant which flows inside the heat transfer tubes
Implementation Method 3
a plurality of fins (13)
Data Source
AI summary
A heat exchanger has a plurality of paths as refrigerant paths, and at least one of the plurality of paths has a coexistent path, in which both of a parallel flow portion where refrigerant flows from a heat transfer tube of one of the tube rows to a heat transfer tube of a tube row which is on a downstream side of the one tube row in terms of an air flow direction, and a counter-flow portion where refrigerant flows from a heat transfer tube of one of the tube rows to a heat transfer tube of a tube row which is on an upstream side of the one tube row in terms of the air flow direction, exist in use both as a condenser and as an evaporator.