A Flexible Top-Down Numerical Modeling of an Air-Cooled Finned-Tube CO 2 Trans-Critical Gas Cooler

Angelo Maiorino, Ciro Aprea and Manuel Gesù Del Duca
Additional contact information
Angelo Maiorino: Department of Industrial Engineering, Università di Salerno, 84084 Fisciano, Italy
Ciro Aprea: Department of Industrial Engineering, Università di Salerno, 84084 Fisciano, Italy
Manuel Gesù Del Duca: Department of Industrial Engineering, Università di Salerno, 84084 Fisciano, Italy

Energies, 2021, vol. 14, issue 22, 1-30

Abstract: Carbon dioxide trans-critical refrigeration systems have been deeply investigated over the last years, with the aim to improve their performance by using several possible technical solutions. However, most of them lead to a more complex and expensive system, and therefore a trade-off is always needed to identify the best viable solution. Therefore, many efforts have also been focused on the study of a critical component of the basic carbon dioxide trans-critical cycle, which is the gas cooler, especially by numerical simulations. This work shows a new flexible approach to numerically model an air-cooled finned-tube CO 2 trans-critical gas cooler integrating a Top-Down methodology with a Finite Difference Method to solve the governing equation of the thermodynamic processes involved. The model was developed to reproduce the behavior of an experimental CO 2 refrigeration system, which provided the experimental data used for its validation. In detail, the model showed a good agreement with the experimental data, with average deviations of 1 K (0.3%), 0.9 bar (1%) and 0.15 kW (2.8%) regarding the refrigerant outlet temperature, the refrigerant outlet pressure and the rejected heat, respectively. The Top-Down numerical approach slightly outperformed the performance of previous numerical models available in the literature. Furthermore, the analysis of the refrigerant temperature and pressure along the tubes and rows also shows that the model can reproduce their behavior consistently and accordingly to data reported in the literature. The proposed approach can be used for detailed thermo-economic analysis of the whole refrigeration system, with the aim to optimize the design of the gas cooler.

Keywords: CO 2 refrigeration; heat exchanger; modeling; finned-tube; design; decomposition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/22/7607/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/22/7607/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:14:y:2021:i:22:p:7607-:d:678922

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().