Heat Reclaim from Air Conditioning System with Internally Submerged and Externally Wound Condenser Tubes
Abstract
Desuperheaters have been in common use for many years to recover heat from the superheated refrigerant of the vapour-compression refrigeration cycle to provide hot water for domestic consumption. Concentric pipe desuperheaters provided with a double-wall construction as a safety precaution are directly submerged in the water tank or indirectly with external recirculating pumps. They are more expensive than bare tube heat exchangers that are directly submerged in the storage tank. It is possible to wrap the condenser coil around the tank with loss of performance. An experimental investigation was conducted to compare the performance of an air conditioning system with these different condensers. The first condenser had a coil submerged in the hot water storage tank while the other had a coil wound round it. The internal coil was found to be more efficient.