Experimental analysis of an air–water heat pump with micro-channel heat exchanger

A multi-port extruded (MPE) aluminium flat tube air heat exchanger was compared to a round tube finned coil (FC). The MPE heat exchanger has parallel flow vertical tube configuration with headers in horizontal position and conventional folded louvred fins. The two heat exchangers were mounted on a 10 kW cooling capacity R410A packaged air heat pump. They were sized to approximately obtain the same cooling and heating capacities in chiller and heating mode, respectively. Climatic room steady state tests without frosting phenomena occurring during heat pump operation, demonstrated that the round tube and the flat tube heat exchanger performance are comparable. The MPE heat exchanger was tested with different refrigerant inlet distributor/outlet tubes configurations to investigate the effect of liquid refrigerant distribution. Cycling frosting/defrosting operations were tested with two equivalent machines placed in parallel outdoor and working at full load condition, one of the units was equipped with the MPE heat exchanger while the other mounted a standard finned coil. Penalization factors were analytically introduced to evaluate frosting associated heating energy and energy efficiency degradation. Test results indicate that both the heat pumps are penalized by frost formation but both the penalization factors are higher for the MPE-unit than the FC-unit one in the −6 to 4 °C air dry bulb temperature range. For the two units, a roughly linear dependence of the heating energy penalization factor and of the energy efficiency factor from the difference between outdoor air and saturated air at the evaporation temperature humidity ratio can be pointed out.