Measurements of Oil Retention in a Microchannel Condenser for AC Systems

In a refrigeration cycle, a small portion of the compressor oil circulates with the refrigerant flow through the cycle components, while most of the oil stays in the compressor. The presence of the lubricant affects the performance of heat exchangers by increasing the pressure losses and adding a thermal resistance to the heat transfer exchange process. The oil effects on microchannel heat exchangers are unique due to their relatively small scale geometry and manifold configuration. In this paper, oil retention in a microchannel type condenser was measured and its effects on heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics are presented. The heat exchanger was a 2 passes, aluminum louvered-fin type condenser that consisted of multiports rectangular microchannels with hydraulic diameter of 0.06 inch (1.7 mm). The refrigerant and oil flow rates were varied and actual operating conditions of an air conditioning condenser for R410A systems were replicated in laboratory. The refrigerant R410A and Polyolester oil mixture was studied at saturation temperature from 85 to 130 °F (29 to 54 °C) and two refrigerant mass flux that are common for a 4 ton nominal capacity AC system for residential applications. Oil mass fraction (OMF) in circulation with the refrigerant was varied from 0.5 to 5.6 in wt.%. The results indicated that at OMFs of 0.5 wt.% to 1 wt.%, which are common ranges in typical air conditioning systems, the oil retention in the microchannel condenser was less than 5% of the microchannel condenser internal volume for all saturation temperatures and all mass fluxes studied in this work. The oil retained in the condenser increased if the OMF increases and it was measured up to 23% of the total microchannel condenser internal volume when the OMF was 5.4 wt. %. The superheated vapor refrigerant section of the condenser held small amount of oil due to high refrigerant vapor superficial velocities inside the microchannel tubes. At OMFs of 0.5 wt. % the heat transfer capacity of the coil was the same of that of oil free conditions. At high saturation temperature of 130 °F (54 °C). and high mass flux, the heat transfer capacity of the coil decreased as the OMF increased and some penalization of refrigerant-side heat transfer rate was observed at OMFs as low as 1 wt. %. If OMF increased then the heat transfer capacity of the heat exchanger was penalized by up to 9% and the pressure drops across the condenser was augmented up to 19% with respect to the oil free case

Modeling of Lubricant Effects in a Microchannel Type Condenser

In HVAC and refrigeration systems, a small portion of the oil circulates with the refrigerant flow through the cycle components, while most of the oil stays in the compressor. The circulating oil can form a fairly homogeneous mixture with the liquid refrigerant, or it can exist as a separate oil-rich film inside the small tubes and headers of a microchannel heat exchanger; the amount of oil held up is affected by the system conditions. The oil retention in the microchannel type condenser is of particular interest as the amount of oil in excess in this component affects the heat transfer capacity and increases the frictional pressure losses. This paper presents a new physics-based model of the oil retention in microchannel-type condensers. The model calculates the local thermodynamic properties in each section for the refrigerant R-410A and Polyester (POE) oil mixture based on the local oil concentration, pressure, temperature, and mass flux. Then the model, which was experimentally validated, predicts the refrigerant-side heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop. The simulation results indicated that the pressure losses increased by over 20% when the oil mass flow rate fraction increased up to 5 weight percent. The augmented mixture viscosity resulted in high frictional pressure drops and shear stress during the two phase flow condensation. The refrigerant side correlations were validated against literature data for in-tube two-phase flow condensation but further investigation is needed for the single-phase annular type flow in microchannel with refrigerant vapor and oil. At low degree of superheat the heat transfer coefficient of the refrigerant and oil mixture was basically unaffected by the oil mass fraction up to 3 weight percent. When the oil mass fraction was higher than 3 weight percent, then the heat transfer capacity of the condenser decreased. At high degree of superheat, the heat transfer coefficient of the oil and refrigerant mixture was penalized when the Oil Mass Fraction (OMF) was higher than 2 weight percent. Further investigation is needed on the suitability and accuracy of the heat transfer coefficients correlations to be adopted with superheated vapor refrigerant and lubricant film in annular flow at the inlet section of the microchannel type condenser

Tough Tables: Carefully Evaluating Entity Linking for Tabular Data

Table annotation is a key task to improve querying the Web and support the Knowledge Graph population from legacy sources (tables). Last year, the SemTab challenge was introduced to unify different efforts to evaluate table annotation algorithms by providing a common interface and several general-purpose datasets as a ground truth. The SemTab dataset is useful to have a general understanding of how these algorithms work, and the organizers of the challenge included some artificial noise to the data to make the annotation trickier. However, it is hard to analyze specific aspects in an automatic way. For example, the ambiguity of names at the entity-level can largely affect the quality of the annotation. In this paper, we propose a novel dataset to complement the datasets proposed by SemTab. The dataset consists of a set of high-quality manually-curated tables with non-obviously linkable cells, i.e., where values are ambiguous names, typos, and misspelled entity names not appearing in the current version of the SemTab dataset. These challenges are particularly relevant for the ingestion of structured legacy sources into existing knowledge graphs. Evaluations run on this dataset show that ambiguity is a key problem for entity linking algorithms and encourage a promising direction for future work in the field

Frosting Performance of Fin-and-Tube Evaporators with Small Copper Tubes Diameter

In modern heat pump systems, the heat exchangers use enhanced heat transfer surfaces for both air and refrigerant sides. In air conditioning applications, conventional 9.5 mm (3/8 inch) tube diameter fin-and-tube coils are slowly being replaced by microchannel heat exchangers. However, during heating mode the energy performance of heat pump systems with microchannel outdoor coils are generally lower than those of fin-and-tube direct-expansion evaporators due to a higher frequency of defrost cycles. A different approach might be to utilize fin-and-tube technology, which has proven records of excellent water drainage characteristics and good performance in frosting operating conditions, and enhance the air side heat transfer rates by introducing a larger number of small diameter copper tubes. In this paper, six fin-and-tube coils with copper tube diameter ranging from 5 mm (1/5 inch) to 7mm (8/29 inch) were experimentally investigated in frosting operating conditions. The laboratory experiments were conducted in an air flow wind tunnel at Oklahoma State University. Experimental data on heat transfer rate and air-side pressure drop across the coils were measured and the fin density and the tube diameter were varied in a parametric fashion during the experimental campaign. The performance of the fin-and-tube coils were also compared to those of a conventional 9.5 mm copper tube diameter fin-and-tube heat exchanger and of a microchannel heat exchanger that had similar air-side frontal area and at similar operating conditions of outdoor direct-expansion evaporators in heat pump systems for residential applications. The trends of the data during frosting operation suggested that reducing the tube diameter was beneficial for frosting performance at low fin density while was harmful at high fin density. The data showed that increasing the fin density increased the capacity but significantly reduced the time for heating service for the evaporator. Small copper tube diameter resulted in about 11% higher initial capacity at dry start conditions and about 4% higher average integrated capacity when considering the entire frost period. The data discussed in this paper serve as basis for future research on direct-expansion evaporators for air-source heat pump applications, in which the frosting of the outdoor heat exchangers is still one of the major concerns

STILTool: a Semantic Table Interpretation evaLuation Tool

This paper describes STILTool, an open-source tool for the automatic evaluation of the quality of semantic annotations computed by semantic table interpretation approaches. STILTool provides a graphical interface allowing users to analyse the correctness of the annotations of tabular data. The tool also provides a set of statistics in order to identify the most common error patterns

Chronic stress influences the immune system through the thyroid axis

The aim of the present work was to analyze the effect of chronic stress on thyroid axis and its influence on the immune response. For this purpose a murine model of chronic stress was developed to evaluate and to correlate thyroid hormone levels with humoral alloimmune response. Results show a reduction in serum levels of thyroid hormones, specially a significant decrease in serum levels of tri-iodotyronine (T3) in stressed animals. On the other hand, alloimmunization was not able to induce an early increment in T3 and thyroxine (T4) levels as it was previously reported in normal animals. In addition, lower titers of alloantibodies were obtained in animals under stress conditions as compared to normal mice. The sustitutive T4 treatment in stressed animals increased significantly alloantibody production as well as the early increment in thyroid hormones after antigenic challenge. These findings suggest that chronic stress induces an alteration of the function of thyroid axis that alters the immune response. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc.Fil: Cremaschi, Graciela Alicia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Centro de Estudios Farmacológicos y Botánicos. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Medicina. Centro de Estudios Farmacológicos y Botánicos; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ingeniería. Departamento de Física. Laboratorio de Radioisótopos; ArgentinaFil: Gorelik, Gabriela Judith. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Centro de Estudios Farmacológicos y Botánicos. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Medicina. Centro de Estudios Farmacológicos y Botánicos; ArgentinaFil: Klecha, Alicia Juana. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ingeniería. Departamento de Física. Laboratorio de Radioisótopos; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Lysionek, Alexis E.. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ingeniería. Departamento de Física. Laboratorio de Radioisótopos; ArgentinaFil: Genaro, Ana Maria. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Centro de Estudios Farmacológicos y Botánicos. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Medicina. Centro de Estudios Farmacológicos y Botánicos; Argentin

A Framework for Quality Assessment of Semantic Annotations of Tabular Data

Much information is conveyed within tables, which can be semantically annotated by humans or (semi)automatic approaches. Nevertheless, many applications cannot take full advantage of semantic annotations because of the low quality. A few methodologies exist for the quality assessment of semantic annotation of tabular data, but they do not automatically assess the quality as a multidimensional concept through different quality dimensions. The quality dimensions are implemented in STILTool 2, a web application to automate the quality assessment of the annotations. The evaluation is carried out by comparing the quality of semantic annotations with gold standards. The work presented here has been applied to at least three use cases. The results show that our approach can give us hints about the quality issues and how to address them

Crossing Borders Between Frontotemporal Dementia and Psychiatric Disorders: An Updated Overview

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) includes a group of neurocognitive syndromes, clinically characterized by altered behaviors, impairment of language proficiency, and altered executive functioning. FTD is one of the most frequently observed forms of dementia in the elderly population and the most common in presenile age. As for other subtypes of dementia, FTD incidence is constantly on the rise due to the steadily increasing age of the population, and its recognition is now becoming a determinant for clinicians. FTD and psychiatric disorders can overlap in terms of clinical presentations by sharing a common genetic predisposition and neuropathological mechanism in some cases. Nonetheless, this association is often unclear and underestimated. Since its first reports, research into FTD has constantly grown, with the identification of recent findings related to its neuropathology, genetic, clinical, and therapeutic issues. Literature is thriving on this topic, with numerous research articles published in recent years. In the present review, we aimed to provide an updated description of the clinical manifestations that link and potentially confound the diagnosis of FTD and psychiatric disorders in order to improve their differential diagnosis and early detection. In particular, we systematically reviewed the literature, considering articles specifically focused on the behavioral variant FTD, published after 2015 on the PubMed database