Title: EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION ON VARIABLE SPEED OPERATION OF AIR CONDITIONING
Abstract: Air conditioning installations are typically design ed with enough cooling capacity to satisfy the desired mini mum temperature under the heaviest load. Since heat loa ds tend to be less than the maximum designed loads, the system will most often be working under part-load rather than full-l oad conditions. Operating at these part-load conditions at fixed capacity will be more expensive than if the capacit y were able to match the required load. Varying capacity air co nditioning systems, which make use of inverter technology, have been developed in order to track the required cooling lo ad more closely. These high quality air conditioners are ad vertised as consuming around 30 per cent less energy than conventional systems. This experimental investigation looked into the ste ady state performance and start-up power requirements of an i nverter driven refrigeration unit versus fixed speed operat ion. A three phase (745 W motor) air conditioning laboratory set up was used in direct-on-line (fixed speed) mode and also with a variable frequency drive (inverter). The results obtained showed that the cooling coefficient of performance increased as the operating frequency was reduced. This means that an improved performance can be achieved at lower operating frequencies. A reduced start-up power was required for the inverter driven system, however the additional powe r requirements for the inverter resulted in the mains driven system being more efficient at full-load conditions . The improved coefficient of performance at lower freque ncies resulted in an improved performance for the inverte r driven system when compared to a conventional system at part-load conditions.
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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