Development and validation of helical-coil-in-fluted-tube gas cooler for CO2 heat pump water heaters

Abstract

SUMMARYA segmented approach [1] for the CO 2 helical-coil-in-fluted-tube gas cooler is developed. The CO 2 helical-coilin-fluted-tube gas cooler consists of helically coiled tube and fluted tube. It is fabricated by twisting a straight copper tube to form helically coiled tube and embedded in the groove of the fluted tube. The available heat transfer and pressure drop correlations for the supercritical CO 2 -side and water-side are provided to simulate the gas cooler. The simulation is compared with a detailed set of experimental data, for given the inlet conditions. The predicted data matches well with the experimental data with absolute average deviations of 1.15, 4.6 and 4.7% for the CO 2 pressure drop, gas cooler exit temperature and hot water temperature, respectively. Based on the good matches between measured data and predicted data, the detailed thermodynamic processes of gas cooler parameters are predicted and analyzed. Furthermore, different arrangements of the gas cooler within the original package dimensions are simulated and better performance of the gas cooler is obtained under the structural parameters of the 3-row fluted tube with the inner diameter 12 mm.