Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, South Africa, 1-4 July, 2007.
In this paper, an attempt is made to model the refrigerants
flow through helical adiabatic capillary tubes used in domestic
refrigerators and small residential air conditioners. The present
study, based on homogenous two-phase flow model, predicts
the performance of the helical capillary tube under adiabatic
flow conditions. The variation of different physical parameters
like pressure, temperature, quality, void fraction, velocity, and
entropy with the length of adiabatic capillary tube has been
investigated. The effect of varying capillary tube diameter and
the pitch on pressure variation along the length is carried out.
The simulation results are validated with experimental findings
of the previous researchers for straight capillary tube as the
literature lacks experimental work on helical capillary tube. It is
found that when subjected to similar conditions, the helical
capillary tubes are shorter than their straight counterparts.
