20 September 2011

PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF VRF SYSTEMS USING COMPRESSOR CURVE METHOD

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VRF (Variable Refrigerant Flow) system is air conditioning system that has some
indoor units. This system has advantage for saving space and cost but it is more difficult to evaluate its performance in actual driving. The larger system tends to be selected beyond necessity and it can’t exercise its potential energy efficiency. To solve this problem, the actual used data should be feed backed to design development phase. There are some methods to measure system’s performance such as air enthalpy
method, however, it is difficult to get data under actual usage. So impractical and accurate measuring method is strongly demanded. We are focusing on the compressor curve method that predicts the performance of air conditioner from the compressor performance. This method can predict refrigerant flow rate with minimum measuring instruments. The purpose of this study is to establish compressor
curve method for VRF system and evaluate its validity. As a result, we confirmed that the performance of VRF system could be predicted using
compressor curve method from comparison to other measuring methods.