Whenever humid air comes in contact with a cooling coil whose temperature is below both the dew-point of water vapor in air and the freezing point, frost will form. The nature of the frost forming on the coil will depend to a large measure on the psychrometric conditions prevailing inside the freezer and whether the air around the coil is subsaturated or supersaturated. Psychrometric theory and the apparatus-dew-point calculating procedure assume that the cooling process path as the air passes through the coil is a straight-line on the psychrometric chart. The actual path is however a result of a much more complex series of processes and is therefore a curve. While researchers have calculated the actual process path on a dehumidifying coil, none has attempted to do the same for a frosted, multi-row coil. It is believed that determining the actual conditions leaving a given row in a multi-row freezer coil is a crucial step in identifying the coil location in the vicinity of which the transformation from the subsaturated zone to the supersaturated zone occurs. This will prove a key step in identifying a demarcation line between the unfavorable snow-like frost and the more traditional (and more favorable) frost formation patterns. Thus, the objective of this paper is to calculate the air path on an actual industrial-size finned-tube, multi-row coil utilizing experimentally derived data and correlate the shape of the path with the prevailing psychrometric conditions in the freezer in the hope of identifying the demarcation line in question.
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e-mail: pmago@ufl.edu
e-mail: Fellow ASME sasherif@ufl.edu
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Modeling the Cooling Process Path of a Dehumidifying Coil Under Frosting Conditions
P. J. Mago,
e-mail: pmago@ufl.edu
P. J. Mago
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Universidad de Oriente, Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela
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Dr. S. A. Sherif
e-mail: Fellow ASME sasherif@ufl.edu
Dr. S. A. Sherif
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Florida, 228 MEB, P.O. Box 116300, Gainesville, FL 32611-6300
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P. J. Mago
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Universidad de Oriente, Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela
e-mail: pmago@ufl.edu
Dr. S. A. Sherif
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Florida, 228 MEB, P.O. Box 116300, Gainesville, FL 32611-6300
e-mail: Fellow ASME sasherif@ufl.edu
Contributed by the Heat Transfer Division for publication in the JOURNAL OF HEAT TRANSFER. Manuscript received by the Heat Transfer Division July 31, 2001; revision received March 20, 2002. Associate Editor: G. P. Peterson.
J. Heat Transfer. Dec 2002, 124(6): 1182-1191 (10 pages)
Published Online: December 3, 2002
Article history
Received:
July 31, 2001
Revised:
March 20, 2002
Online:
December 3, 2002
Citation
Mago, P. J., and Sherif, D. S. A. (December 3, 2002). "Modeling the Cooling Process Path of a Dehumidifying Coil Under Frosting Conditions ." ASME. J. Heat Transfer. December 2002; 124(6): 1182–1191. https://doi.org/10.1115/1.1494451
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