Investigation of compression characteristics and structural optimization of the swing compressor with two discharge channels

The swing compressor is one of the most widely used rotary compressors in the household air conditioning system. Its performance improvement is an important research direction. This paper proposes a relatively complete mathematical model to investigate the operation performance of conventional swing compressor (CSC) and swing compressor with two discharge channels (SCTC). The compression characteristics have been displayed by p-θ diagram and the thermal performance parameters including cooling capacity, power consumption, COP and discharge temperature have been calculated. At the suction pressure of 0.867 MPa and the discharge pressure of 2.542 MPa, the calculated and experimental results show that the errors of cooling capacity, power consumption and COP are within 1%, 5% and 4%, respectively, while the operation frequency is in the range from 30 Hz to 90 Hz. The errors of discharge temperature are within 5°C. Hence. it can be considered that the proposed mathematical model is significant to investigate and optimize the operation performance of swing compressor. Based on this mathematical model, the exhaust cavity opening angle ( Ψ ) of SCTC has been investigated in detail for further improving the operation performance. Compared with the tested prototype of SCTC with Ψ of 111.5°, SCTC with Ψ of 70° has a lower power consumption and a higher COP in theory. The decrement rates of total power consumption are 0.28%, 0.37% and 0.65%, and the improvement rates of COP are 0.36%, 0.35% and 0.65% for three different operation frequencies. It is valuable for the practical application of SCTC to achieve a reduction in power consumption and an increase in COP by simply optimizing Ψ .