Chest freezer with integrated heat exchanger for augmenting the COP

Abstract

The study analyzes the performances of a modified chest freezer with a heat exchanger. The experiments are performed on the chest freezer to analyze the impact of baffles of various geometries placed inside the heat exchanger on the freezer's coefficient of performance. To remove the thermal energy the refrigerant before condensation phase, water is used as a coolant in the heat exchanger. Baffles with four different profiles were used for the analyses and they were baffles with sextant geometry, sextant profile with holes, strip cuts, and internal sextant cuts. Experiments are performed with various water mass flow rates and for different product loads. Further experiments are conducted for to analyze the performance of chest freezer for increase in number of baffles inside the heat exchanger. Experimental results indicate that the segmental baffles having sextant profiles with internal sextant cuts showed the best performance in terms of COP and low irreversibility. The coefficient of performance increased from 0.9 to 0.1 when conventional VCR systems were integrated with heat exchangers having six numbers of inserts and keeping the mass flow rate at 0.43 kg/s. The proposed VCR saw a reduction of 10 % consumes in power consumption compared to conventional VCR.