Study of a high efficiency residential split water-cooled air conditioner

This paper presents an experimental investigation of a high-efficiency split residential water-cooled air conditioner that utilizes cellulose pad as the filling material of the cooling tower. The cooling tower performance is improved due to good water wettability of the cellulose pad that causes a uniform water film over the entire surface of the pads and a perfect contact between water and cooling air. The cooling tower is integrated with the condensing unit of the Rankine-cycle in structure design to form an integral-type outdoor unit. The heat and mass transfer characteristics of the cellulose pads is first studied and the results are used for the design of the cooling tower. A prototype with 3.52 kW cooling capacity was constructed and tested in the present study. The experimental results show the coefficient of performance (COP) reaches 3.45 at wet-bulb temperature 27 °C, dry-bulb temperature 35 °C, air velocity 1.7 m/s, water flow rate 5.1 l/min, and that is higher than the standard value (2.96) of those conventional residential split air conditioners.