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Cooling capacity control for multi-evaporator vapor compression systems.

Number: pap. 2433

Author(s) : BURNS D. J., BORTOFF S. A.

Summary

Multi-evaporator vapor compression systems (ME-VCS) provide cooling to multiple zones. The thermodynamic conditions in these zones are independent: the heat loads often di?er, and the occupants of these spaces often have di?erent desired room temperatures. Therefore, in order to regulate each zone to its desired set point temperature, the amount of thermal energy removed by each evaporator must be controlled independently. However, a common evaporating pressure introduces coupling between all the evaporators that makes this objective di?cult—the valve and piping arrangement imposes the constraint that all evaporators operate at the same temperature. In order to control the per-zone cooling, a common control strategy employed in the literature is to duty cycle the evaporator (alternate between a fully-open and fully-closed valve). However, duty cycling causes periodic disturbances to not only the local zone, but also to many critical machine temperatures and pressures, and these disturbances are often not transient but instead persist inde?nitely. Fluctuations induced by the periodic disturbances can degrade the ability of the machine to regulate zone temperatures with zero steady state error, cause excessively high or low temperatures during peaks of the period, and couple into most machine signals of interest in ways that are di?cult to describe with low order dynamical models. An observed behavior of refrigerant mass distribution in multi-path heat exchangers is exploited for control purposes. Multi-path heat exchangers are characterized by an inlet header pipe that splits refrigerant ?ow to two or more parallel paths through the heat exchanger and collects those paths into a common outlet header pipe. In the paper, we describe the following empirical phenomenon exploited for control: as the inlet valve is decreased, refrigerant mass ?ow rate entering the heat exchanger is reduced, and at some critical ?ow rate, refrigerant is shown to preferentially ?ow in some paths more than others, causing maldistribution. This uneven refrigerant distribution is repeatable, reduces the capacity in a continuous manner and can be exploited with feedback controllers to regulate the per-zone cooling. A feedback controller is designed to provide stability and robustness to per-zone conditions and setpoints for this controller that relate per-path superheat temperature to overall evaporator capacity is created in such a way as to be robust to changes in local zone temperatures and the overall system evaporating temperature. This strategy provides zone decoupling and ultimately creates a virtual control input for a supervisory controller such as a model predictive controller. Experiments demonstrate the e?ectiveness of this approach on a two-zone air conditioner in laboratory tests.

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Pages: 9 p.

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Details

  • Original title: Cooling capacity control for multi-evaporator vapor compression systems.
  • Record ID : 30018760
  • Languages: English
  • Source: 2016 Purdue Conferences. 16th International Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Conference at Purdue.
  • Publication date: 2016/07/11

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