Theoretical Study on the Performance of Air Cooler in Cold Storage

Air cooler is the most common air cooling and conditioning equipment that used in frozen and cold storage. However, neither application-oriented or production-oriented enterprises have a sufficient understanding about the performance of air cooler, which will restrict its performance enhancement and technological innovation to some extent. Therefore, this paper conducts a theoretical study on the performance of air cooler to guide the optimal design of air cooler. The distributed parameter model of the air cooler is first established along with some sub-models calculating the structural parameters, the physical properties of the wet air, the heat transfer coefficient and the flow resistance on the refrigerant side and the air side. Then, the proposed models are integrated to calculate the performance of air cooler under the effect of different structural parameters, such as fin spacing, fin thickness, tube spacing, outer tube diameter and finned tube materials. Results show that choosing the relatively smaller fin spacing and outer tube diameter, the larger tube spacing and finned tube materials with high thermal conductivity would contribute to the performance improvement of the air cooler, while the effect of the fin thickness is very small. However, the occupied volume, cost and processing difficulty should also be considered for enterprises in the design stage.