Numerical investigation of flow and heat transfer for a split air conditioner indoor unit.

The heat transfer effect of the heat exchanger has been one of the main research focus on how to improve the performance of split air conditioner indoor units. Different locations of the fin and tube heat exchanger and different shapes of inner shell will form different air duct system, which directly affects the air flow field distribution of indoor units, thereby affecting the heat transfer performance of the device and the volume of the outlet air. In this paper, a three-dimensional thin-section model was established for modeling indoor unit by employing CFX in ANSYS. The numerical simulations of a three-stage heat exchanger were conducted. The internal flow field and heat transfer of the air conditioner indoor unit were analyzed for different shapes of heat exchanger. It was proved that the optimized three-stage heat exchanger showed more uniform flow field distribution and more air volume as well as better heat transfer performance.