V-Style Coil Condensers

[milen_d]

Hey guys. I am curious about the reasoning behind the layout of condensers. What are the advantages of a V-Style condenser as opposed to a vertical or horizontal condenser? Does the angled position make the condenser anymore efficient?

[Glenn Moore]

From a lot of site experience V style condensers give a lot of problems to system operation. The Vstyle condenser was designed to reduce the plant footprint, but it has inherent problems . Air flows are never equal in both coils,and often the coils face differing elements throughout the day, ie sunshine,winds etc.
This causes the 2 coils to act differently , and one becomes the master and the other it’s confused follower. A similar problem occurs when large vertical or horizontal condensers are made up from more than one coil block and are headered together. The differing coil pressure drop will lead to one coil acting as the main condenser whereas the other coil starts to store liquid and almost becomes a sub cooler. Unless adjacent liquid outlet pipe work is configured to create droplegs , or a Venturi tee is built into the liquid outlets from the coils the varying quality of liquid will exit the condensers which will affect system efficiency due to poor expansion valve operation. Simply holding the 2 liquid outlet pipes from the 2 coils you can often feel the difference in the 2 liquid pipes this can often be anything between 5 - 12k difference in temperature. Obviously the 2 liquid pipes should have virtual equal temperatures, but unless the exiting pipe work has been designed to equal the liquid outlet flows ,poor efficiency is the result. With the “new” refrigerants made from a 3 refrigerant mixture , good condenser operation is vitally important also to prevent fractionating during the condensation process ,good fan control or better invertor “speed” fan control will help to prevent this occurring.