Experimental investigations of different compressors based electric vehicle heat pump air-conditioning systems in low temperature environment

This paper presents the experimental investigations of the electric vehicle HPAC (heat pump air-conditioning) systems integrated with the swash plate variable displacement compressor, the scroll compressor and the electric scroll compressor, respectively. The effects of different ambient temperatures and compressor rotational speeds on the system performance were evaluated. The experimental results show that the average vehicle cabin temperature increases with the ambient temperature for the system runtime of 1000sec with constant compressor rotational speed and displacement. When the ambient temperature is below -10°C, the swash plate based HPAC system has highest average cabin temperatures with a compressor rotational speed of 3400r/min. However, with the same rotational speed, the scroll based HPAC system has much higher average cabin temperatures than the swash plate based system for the ambient temperature above -5°C. In a constant ambient temperature, the cabin temperature increases with the compressor rotational speed.