CFD Study of Phase Separators in A/C Automotive Systems Fluent, Incorporated

Format:

Book

Conference/Event

Author/Creator:

Barbat, Tiberiu, author.

Conference Name:

SAE 2003 World Congress & Exhibition (2003-03-03 : Detroit, Michigan, United States)

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource cm

Place of Publication:

Warrendale, PA SAE International 2003

Summary:

In the refrigerant circuit of an automotive air-conditioning system, oil is needed to lubricate the moving parts of the compressor. However, it is desired to limit the presence of oil within the compressor, avoiding its flow to the areas of heat exchangers (like evaporator and condenser), in order to improve the efficiency of the heat transfer process. The oil separation is done immediately downstream of the compressor in a device using either impinging or centrifugal effects on the refrigerant carrier gas flow. The oil phase is assumed to exist as a secondary phase in the form of droplets. The main requirement for a good design of an oil separator device is to achieve the maximum liquid separation with the smallest pressure drop for the gas flow. The numerical simulations were performed using Eulerian Multiphase model and Mixture model of FLUENT6 on fully unstructured tetrahedral meshes of various design iterations of the separator. Resulting CFD flow fields were used to compare separation efficiency and pressure drop of different designs and flow regimes

Notes:

Vendor supplied data

Publisher Number:

2003-01-0736

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license