Air-cooled condensers are routinely designed for a variety of applications, including residential air-conditioning systems. Recent attempts at improving the performance of these heat exchangers have included the consideration of microchannel tube, multilouver fin heat exchangers instead of the more conventional round tube-plate fin designs. Such microchannel tube, multilouver fin heat exchangers have a large number of geometric parameters that affect the performance of the condenser. The present work provides a systematic procedure to optimize the performance of such air-cooled microchannel condensers with refrigerant blend R-410A for minimum material and energy consumption. Flow regime-based models from the literature and the authors’ prior work are adapted to model condensation of refrigerant blend R-410A in the microchannel tubes under consideration. A variety of refrigerant-side pass arrangements are also considered to help tailor the pass-wise performance to maximize heat transfer within the allowable pressure drop constraints. Similarly, correlations for airflow over multilouver fins are used to predict the air-side behavior. Features of the air-side geometry such as fin pitch, height, and louver details are varied to obtain the optimal configuration. Through the analysis of several cases, it is shown that material savings can result through judicious choice of surface area and refrigerant-side flow area allocations. The results from this study can be used to guide the design of air-cooled condensers for a wide range of design conditions.

Units: SI