Air Conditioning System with Cascaded Integration of a Latent Heat Storage for Flexible and Efficient Operation
Abstract
The design of a pilot plant is presented, which is built to prove the feasibility of a novel concept for the integration of latent heat storages in the refrigerant cycle of air conditioning systems. The latent heat storage (LHS) is in direct heat exchange with an evaporating or condensing refrigerant flow. Thus, temperature losses by an intermediate heat carrier loop are eliminated. Furthermore the integration of the storage shall not affect the evaporation and condensation level of the air conditioning system in order to keep the energetic efficiency of the system unchanged. During loading the LHS is cooled by evaporation of refrigerant in parallel with two indoor units, allowing for system operation at standard suction pressure. During unloading the storage serves as a condenser, connected in series between the two indoor units. A comprehensive measurement concept allows a detailed analysis of the operation modes.