Investigation on the Effect of Fin Width on the Heat Transfer Performance of the Condenser Used in the Automotive Air Conditioning System

The efficiency of the air conditioning system will affect the comfort and the energy consumption. Therefore, study on it can help to reduce the emission reduction. In the system, condenser is a quite important part, which mainly affect the performance of the whole device. In this paper, a new type structure of condenser of automotive air conditioning system has been studied, and some conclusion has been obtained: (1) Unit area heat exchange decreases when the fin width increases. The resistance increases with the fin width increases, and the heat transfer coefficient decreases with the fin width increases; (2) The resistance has a higher decreasing speed and both heat transfer coefficient and the total heat flux increase at a lower speed, which means that the overall heat transfer rate can't be increased just by increase the width of the fin. According to the study of the effect of fin width on the condenser performance, the validity of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) applied on the air conditioning system has been proven.