Numerical Analysis of Intake Effects on Inflow Air in a Radar Cooling System with an Air-Cooled Condenser

An air-cooled condenser used in vapor-compression refrigeration cycles relies on a forced convection by fan and is widely adopted due to its advantages in ease of construction and maintenance. The operating point of an air-cooled condenser fan is defined by the intersection of the fan unit's performance curve and the system resistance curve. Therefore, a system-level characteristic analysis is necessary to fully understand the condenser fan's operating characteristics. This study conducts a 3D Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes analysis to evaluate the cooling performance of a radar cooling system condenser. To simulate the flow resistance inside the cooling system, the entire cooling system must be modeled; therefore, simplified momentum and heat source term models are applied to the fan and condenser to reduce the computational cost of the numerical analysis. The numerical results are validated against experimental data provided by manufacturers. The condenser's performance is primarily influenced by the volume of incoming air; thus, a parametric study is conducted by varying the intake area and location of the cooling system. The internal flow structure was analyzed to identify factors affecting changes in cooling performance. The results indicate that the intake area and location of the cooling system significantly affect the flow rate and temperature of the air entering the condenser fan.