Finned tube heat exchanger (TFHX) is an important part of air conditioning and heat pump systems. This type of heat exchanger consists of a bundle of finned coils. There are many structural parameters of finned tube heat exchanger (tube diameter, tube length, fin type, fin thickness, etc.), and its heat transfer performance is greatly affected by these parameters. Therefore, optimization of these parameters can usually significantly improve the performance of finned tube heat exchanger.
The performance of finned tube heat exchanger will also be strongly affected by the refrigerant circuit, that is, the refrigerant flow path along different pipe systems. For a given number of coils, the number of possible refrigerant circuits is exponential and very large. Therefore, either exhaustive search method or traditional optimization is used.
Finned tube heat exchanger is the most widely used type of heat exchanger in the field of refrigeration and air conditioning. Reducing the diameter of the heat exchanger can help improve the performance of the finned tube heat exchanger, reduce the volume and reduce the cost. In this paper, the development process of finned tube heat exchanger with small tube diameter in recent years is summarized, the reasons for the reduction of tube diameter are described, and the advantages of using small tube diameter copper tubes are analyzed;
