Design and Development of a Condenser for an Air-Conditioning System Working in Very High Ambient Temperature and Dusty External Environment

The aim of this paper is to highlight the unique requirement of air conditioning systems for very high ambient temperature and dusty environment. Typical requirement of such applications is needed for off road vehicles, tractors, railway etc. Among them the system requirement for railway has its own challenges in terms of performance, reliability and serviceability. In one of such applications existing design of air conditioning system was facing the issue of frequent tripping during the peak summer condition. One of the reasons was very high dust environment around its condenser area. The level of dust was so high that mesh filter was deployed at condenser front area to prevent choking of condenser fins heat transfer area. The condenser filter cleaning was needed on daily basis to run the Air Conditioning (AC) properly. To solve this problem a newly designed multi-flow wave fin type condenser was deployed in place of regular multi-flow louver fin condenser. The newly designed system with wave fin condenser has eliminated the need of filter and problem of AC tripping got resolved. The performance of AC was also improved significantly. The study provides guidelines to select and design condenser for AC system suitable for high ambient temperature and dusty external environment.