Experimental Study for the Effect of Pre-Cooling the Condenser Inlet Air of Split Type Air Conditioning Unit

The reduction of electric power consumption is considered to be a critical issue especially in the areas with elevated temperatures such as Iraq. In Basra city, the electric power consumption due to the air conditioning units (ACU) is so high. In this work, an evaporative cooling unit (ECU) is fabricated and tested where it is retrofitted with the condenser part of a split-type air conditioner. The experimental procedure was done in Basra engineering technical college located in west of Basra city. The present work is categorized in two cases. In case one, the system runs without using the ECU, while in case two the system is tested with ECU. The obtained results show that decreasing the inlet air temperature to the condenser will drop off the condensation and evaporation temperatures. Besides, it decreases the compression pressure ratio and increases the refrigerant mass flow rate. With this modification, it is found that the consumption power is decreased by 26% and COP increased by 90% compared with case one. The second law analysis of the modified system shows that using ECU will decrease most the exergy destruction and losses in the components. Only exergy destruction in the evaporator is increased. The system second law efficiency is improved by 69.5%.