Contact resistance in air-cooled plate fin-tube air-conditioning condensers

Test equipment and procedures have been developed to measure the heat transfer performance of an industry-standard wavy plate fin-tube condenser, and to compare it with alternative designs. Two test rigs were employed: one used direct electric heating, and the other used an R22 thermosyphon. Analysis revealed that the standard production heat exchanger suffered from excessive fin-tube resistance. This was confirmed by sectioning and microscopic examination. Seven different designs were compared at the same Reynolds number. The results were analysed to isolate the air-side heat transfer coefficient.