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Automotive fixed orifice tube (FOT) systems are especially prone to cycling losses due to their clutch cycling operation. Therefore, it is important to better understand the dynamics of the refrigerant and oil migration during transient events such as cycling and start-up. To measure the refrigerant mass and oil distribution of an automotive R134a FOT breadboard system, two ball valves around each component are added. By simultaneously closing the valves, the refrigerant and oil is trapped in different sections of the system and can be measured. The transient refrigerant migration during a stop-start transient as well as the refrigerant mass distribution as a function of system charge at steady state operation is presented. A transparent accumulator and transparent tubes at the inlet and outlet of the accumulator are used to visualize the flow of the refrigerant. High speed video snapshots are presented for the first seconds after the start-up.

This paper presents experimental data from an investigation of an R744 dual evaporator system for automobile applications in a breadboard laboratory. Several expansion devices combinations were investigated, focusing on comparing fixed area and controlled area expansion devices. The role of an accumulator in an R744 dual evaporator system is demonstrated by experiments conducted with a prototype accumulator in which the outflow of liquid R744 and oil is controllable. Contrary to a conventional single R744 evaporator system, the refrigerant outlet qualities in a dual evaporator system are not fixed by the accumulator inlet/exit quality in steady state. An accumulator in an R744 dual evaporator system only guarantees that the quality of the mixed flow downstream of the evaporators has the same quality as the inlet/exit quality of the accumulator.