GAS–LIQUID FLOW SIMULATION IN REFRIGERANT DISTRIBUTOR FOR AIR CONDITIONER

Heat exchangers with small-diameter multi-path tubes have been recently used to improve the efficiency of air conditioners. The difficulty in using tubes with small diameters and multi-paths is the nonuniformity of refrigerant distribution in refrigerant distributors, which results in lower heat-exchange efficiency. Grid methods, such as the volume of fluid method, are now widely used to simulate detailed motions of gas–liquid interfaces. A weak point of grid methods is the numerical diffusion of interfaces that occurs if the scale of interfaces becomes close to the computational grid sizes. We previously developed a particle/grid hybrid method for simulating multi-scale free surfaces. For this study, we modified the hybrid method and applied it to gas–liquid flow simulations in a distributor. The liquid film behaviors in both the distributor and a bend pipe placed in the upstream of the distributor were simulated mainly using the particle method, and gas flows were simulated using the grid method. The predicted liquid film near the outer circumference of the curvature in the bend pipe was thicker than that of near inner circumference of the curvature, which qualitatively agreed with the measurement. The simulated distribution ratio under a steady-flow condition agreed well with the measurement; the predicted distribution ratio was 0.63 and the measured distribution ratio was 0.6.