KARNATAK LAW SOCIETY’S

GOGTE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

UDYAMBAG, BELAGAVI-590008

(An Autonomous Institution under Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belagavi)

(APPROVED BY AICTE, NEW DELHI)

Course seminar Report

Flow Control in Refrigeration Systems

Submitted in the partial fulfillment for the academic requirement of

7th Semester B.E.

in

CONTROL ENGINEERING

(16ME72)

Submitted by
ABHISHEK SAVAKAR 2GI16ME008
ADARSH TELI 2GI16ME010
ADITYA THAKKAR 2GI16ME012
ADITYA MASKAR 2GI16ME013
ADITYA ATIWADKAR 2GI16ME014

GUIDE

Dr.V.N.Satwik
KARNATAK LAW SOCIETY’S
(2019-2020)
 GOGTE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
UDYAMBAG, BELAGAVI-590008

(An Autonomous Institution under Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belagavi)

(APPROVED BY AICTE, NEW DELHI)

Department of Mechanical

CERTIFICATE
This is to certify that Mr.Abhishek Savakar, Mr.Adarsh Teli, Mr.Aditya Thakkar, Mr.Aditya
Maskar and Mr Aditya Atiwadkar of 7th semester and bearing USN: 2GI16ME008, 2GI16ME010,
2GI16ME012, 2GI16ME013 and 2GI16ME014 has satisfactorily completed the course activity
(Seminar) in CONTROL ENGINEERING course (Course code: 16ME72). It can be considered as a
bonafide work carried out in partial fulfillment for the academic requirement of 7th Semester B.E.
(Mechanical)prescribed by KLS Gogte Institute of Technology, Belagavi during the academic year 2019 -
2020

The report has been approved as it satisfies the academic requirements in respect of Assignment (Course
activity) prescribed for the said Degree.

Signature of the Faculty Signature of the HOD

Date: 20/11/19
Contents

Page No

1. Abstract………………………………………………………

… 4

2. Introduction…..……………………………………………

…… 5

3. CONTROL ALGORITHMS FOR REFRIGERATION SYSTEMS…….…… 7

4. Various control

system..…………………………………………. 11

5. Conclusion……….……………………………………………

… 14

6. References……………………………………………………

…. 15
Abstract—

Last decades considerable attention has been given to refrigeration systems in order to decrease
its energy consumption. Various control methods for refrigeration systems were developed. These
methods differ in their theoretical basis and performance depends on system operating conditions.
A review of different flow control methods used in the refrigeration systems are discussed in the
present report. The main difficulties and summarize the more recent developments in their control
techniques are highlighted.
INTRODUCTION

The most critical problem in the world is to meet the energy demand, because of steadily
increasing energy consumption. The increase in the energy prices in the last decades has
motivated many research studies to identify the most energy consuming systems and ways to
improve its efficiency. The huge energy consumption of refrigeration systems (RSs) in homes
and commercial buildings provides both economic and environmental motivation for the
development of such systems to become highly efficient in order to decrease its electricity
consumption. Refrigeration systems are inefficient energy saving due to design faults, bad
installations, and lack of maintenance and are susceptible to fail up operation frequently. The
energy saving is reached through the optimization of the RSs performance with the use of control
techniques in these systems .

Abbreviations
AC air conditioning
ANN artificial neural network
COP coefficient of performance
DEAC direct expansion air conditioner
EEV electronic expansion valve
MIMO multi-input multi-output
NN neural network
P proportional
PFC predictive functional controller
PI proportional-integral
PID proportional-integral-derivative
RH relative humidity
RS refrigeration system
TEV thermostatic expansion valve
VSC variable speed compressor
VSRS variable speed refrigeration system

Conventional RSs contain four main components: fixed speed compressor, condenser,
mechanical expansion valves, and evaporator. Although these systems are designed to satisfy the
maximum load, they work under partial load conditions most of their life cycle with employing
on-off control for the compressor. On-off control method is the most used conventional technique
to control RSs . However, such a conventional technique to cope with partial loading could
deteriorate compressor durability to a considerable extent. Therefore, the on-off control scheme is
gradually being replaced by a variable speed refrigeration system (VSRS) with an inverter driven
compressor to control its speed.

In modern VSRS, which are typical closed-loop control systems, incorporate variable speed
compressors (VSCs) and electronic expansion valves (EEVs) as controllable components to
improve the system performance and energy efficiency. These components have to be properly
feedback-controlled; otherwise the systems may exhibit even poorer performance and more
energy consumption than the conventional systems. The VSC can improve the system efficiency,
considerable reduction in power consumption, extend components life and reduce the indoor
temperature fluctuations, in comparison with the conventional on-off compressor since it
eliminates frequent stop-start cycles .
With the aim of achieving high efficiency, many RSs in use employ VSC for better control
accuracy and higher operational energy efficiency. In the VSRS, the compressor capacity is
regulated by varying its speed by an inverter inserted into compressor electric motor. The inverter
is an interface between the utility input and the compressor motor that controls the speed of the
motor by changing the magnitude of voltage, current or frequency. This type of control allows its
output capacity to continuously match with system's load, resulting in an energy saving in
comparison with classical thermostatic control that imposes only on-off cycles on the compressor
Figure 1 shows VSRS and control system, where Tei and Teo are the refrigerant temperatures at
evaporator inlet and outlet respectively, Two is the water temperature at evaporator outlet, SH is
the refrigerant superheat degree, VO is the EEV opening percentage (%), f is the compressor
frequency, and DAQ is the data acquisition

Capillary tube and thermostatic expansion valve (TEV) are not able to deal with wide range of
operation conditions and they also present some response lag. Energy savings can be obtained by
replacing the conventional expansion device by an EEV. The EEV can be used as the throttling
device, to control the refrigerant flow so that a pre-set superheat set-point value is kept at the
evaporator outlet. The EEVs are usually provided with an automatic controller that is responsible
for determining the valve opening that keeps the superheat at the outlet of the evaporator within
the desired limits. In general the degree of superheat is mainly controlled by the EEV which
could regulate evaporating pressure and refrigerant mass flow rate as well. In practice, a
reasonable compromise is attained by setting the superheat temperature in the range 5-10 K. The
RS becomes very flexible and no liquid is coming out of the evaporator, so that the compressors
can work safely. The employment of this valve can be advantageous when compared with the
conventional expansion devices because it has shorter response time and the control technique
used in most of these systems is generally able to keep the superheat at the outlet of the
evaporator within the desired limits value under every condition, which contributes to improve
the system efficiency. The EEV has important effect on the system efficiency and energy
consumption. In general, for a wide range of system operating conditions, the systems use EEVs
showed much higher performance than that use capillary tubes.

CONTROL ALGORITHMS FOR REFRIGERATION SYSTEMS

There are three parts in a closed-loop control system: error calculation, controller, and plant Error
calculation part calculates the difference between the desired output, r(k), and the actual output,
y(k), of the system. This difference is called error signal, e(k). A controller finds out a control
signal, u(k), by considering this error signal. A plant, the system itself under investigation,
generates the actual output, y(k), in reply to the u(k). The most important problem is generating
the most suitable control signal that derives the plant to minimize the error, which means that the
actual output and the desired output are almost equal in the closed-loop control system

The conventional control schemes for VSRS are mainly focused on two control variables; the
degree of superheat and the refrigeration capacity. The speed of the compressor and the opening
amount of the EEV are control parameters in order to adjust the refrigeration capacity and the
degree of superheat respectively to desired values.
It is noted that in the VSRS, the capacity and superheat cannot be controlled independently
because of interfering loops inside when the compressor speed and opening amount of EEV are
changing simultaneously.. Due to the inherent nonlinearity of the VSRSs, the linear control
theory might lead to a relatively poor control performance of the system. The quality of control
system for compressor speed and EEV opening are considered crucial to the operating
performance of the complete system. Therefore, extensive studies on how to properly control
these components in VSRS have been carried out and reported. Hence designing an eligible
controller for EEV and VSC is important. A sampling of the researches done for different control
approaches.

CLASSICAL CONTROL METHODS

Common classical control techniques such as on-off, proportional (P), proportional-integral (PI),
and proportional-integral-derivative (PID) are widely used in RSs, due to their low cost and ease
of tuning and operation.

ON-OFF CONTROLLER
The basic idea of the on-off controller is shown in Fig. Nguyen et al. studied the degradation of
the performance in different configurations of AC systems due to the modulation on-off and
concluded that the intermittent operation of the system causes other inconveniences, such as the
additional energy consumption to start up the compressor. A comparison of the performance of
capacity controlled and conventional on-off controlled heat pumps was done by It was found that
the capacity modulated system, with a speed control down to half of the rated compressor running
speed using a thyristor controller, could offer more than 10% improvement in energy utilization
efficiency over the conventional system. Fujita et al. performed experiments for capacity control
of a multi AC with two indoor units. They suggested that the reduction of an on-off operation
time could provide comfort and save energy. The steady-state performance and transient response
of a commercial fixed-speed on-off controlled chiller was investigated by and presented
comparative performance results obtained during operation with a TEV and with EEV.
PI CONTROLLER
The constructer of the PI control system shown in Fig. An evaporator superheat control system
with an EEV was investigated theoretically and experimentally by The sampled-data PI algorism
for EEV openings was employed to control the evaporator superheat. Control experimental
results showed that the proposed simulation model was confirmed effective to find proper control
parameters. Lin and Yeh developed feedback control algorithms which incorporate a traditional
proportional integral (PI) controller for controlling the evaporator superheat via an EEV. The
results showed that the superheat may vary on a wide range in case of transient conditions and
then the liquid refrigerant may enter the compressor. Hua and Jeong designed PI controller with
feed forward compensator to handle the thermal capacity and the superheat independently.
Empirical models were used to derive two proportional-integral (PI) controllers for the
compressor speed and EEV opening in the RS . The models were implemented into a dual-single
input, single output control strategy. The controller was operated satisfactorily in terms of
reference tracking and disturbance rejection. The PI controller scheme with decoupling model to
manage the thermal capacity and superheat independently for saving energy and progress of
coefficient of performance (COP) was presented by The experimental results showed that the
proposed control system can provide excellent system performance on saving energy and
providing better degree of COP. A decoupled approach using proportional-integral (PI) control of
compressor speed and accumulator heating was taken for single-evaporator vapor compression
cycles, and multivariable H2 control was applied for two-evaporator systems by The control
strategies were shown to be effective in experimental tests, avoiding critical heat-flux for nominal
heat load disturbances while satisfying system constraints.
PID CONTROLLER
In Fig. 6, the operating method of the PID control system is shown. Masatoshi Mitsui
proposed a refrigerant flow control method by employing a solenoid type EEV in the
automobile AC system. The proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control algorithm was
adopted for feedback control. An experimental investigation by Krakow et al. indicated that
to maintain indoor air temperature by varying compressor speed, and indoor relative humidity
(RH) by varying supply fan speed, separately, using a PID control method, space air
temperature and RH may be controlled simultaneously. Outtagarts et al. presented a PID
controller based on the plant characteristics obtained from the experiments for controlling the
evaporator superheat via an EEV. In Finn and Doyle an EEV with PID controller and a TEV
are compared by using a reduced complexity, identified evaporator model. The performance
of water to water multi-type heat pump system using PID controller for VSC and EEV was
investigated by Experimental results showed that the system could be adequately controlled
by keeping control gains at certain levels for various operating conditions. In Aprea et al. a
significant reduction on energy consumption of a vapor compression system by 20% was
reached with the use of the scroll compressor and the use of the complex PID control system
in comparison with the semi-hermetic reciprocating compressor. Li et al. employed PID
controller to adjust the superheat in a direct expansion (DE) solar assisted heat pump hot
water system. The experimental results indicated that it was hard to get satisfactory results
under varying working conditions. The performance of eight direct expansion air conditioners
(DEAC) use either TEV or EEV with PID controller was reported and compared by They
conclude that the application of EEV technology to air conditioners demonstrated
considerable energy savings

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A PID control algorithms for EEVs used in dry-expansion evaporators for RSs were reported
by [34]. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the control algorithm. Also an
experimental study to investigate the indoor thermal comfort characteristics of a DEAC unit
using PID controller to control VSC, fan speed and EEV was reported by [35]. The
experimental results suggested that varying both speeds of compressor and supply fan in the
system would influence indoor thermal comfort. In [36], the degree of superheat controller
was developed based on a conventional PID degree of superheat controller by adding two
feed forward channels so that information of speed changes of compressor and supply fan can
be timely passed to the degree of superheat controller. With the improved degree of superheat
control performance, the operating efficiency and stability of the DEAC system were also
enhanced. While, an adaptive PID-controller using the control tuning rule to regulate the
superheat degree at the outlet of the evaporator was developed by [37]. The results showed
that the adaptive controller provided a good response with an inferior percentage error. A
simple auto-tuning control PID algorithm for EEV to regulate dry-expansion evaporator
superheat in commercial refrigeration applications was proposed by [14]. The algorithm
exhibits better performance than other auto-tuning approaches, such as the one based on relay
feedback. A summary of classical control methods used in RSs are listed in Table 1.
On-off control method is the most used conventional technique to control RSs [7]. This
method has a big drawback of undesired current peaks during its state transitions. Also in
general, conventional classical controllers cannot deal with nonlinear behaviors including
uncertainties in system parameters, time delays and limited operation point of RSs, which

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may reduce the energy efficiency. Conventional control techniques are not able to accomplish
the stable cooling in vapor compression air conditioning (AC) system. A strategy that could
be used to overcome the aforementioned problems associated classical control techniques is
to use a controller with self-tuning algorithms.

MODERN CONTROL METHODS

The modern control of a nonlinear system such as RS is one of the most challenging and
difficult subjects in control theory. Different methods used to solve this problem as adaptive
and optimal control.

ADAPTIVE CONTROL

The adaptation mechanism of the adaptive control system is shown in Fig. 7. Changenet et al.
developed a method based on the physical modeling of the evaporator in order to use a
predictive functional controller (PFC).

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OPTIMAL CONTROL

The operating criterion of an optimal control system is shown in Fig. In Outtagarts et al. PID-
based and optimal control algorithms were developed and compared to control the EEV
opening. Results showed that for cold-start with speed steps, the degree of superheating was
higher than the set value for both control laws. These differences were particularly high and
were larger for PID control than for optimal control algorithm.

A typical industrial RS was conceived, built and modified in the laboratory, receiving a
power law control system, which utilizes a frequency inverter to reduce energy consumption
by .The closed-loop power law controlled system shows a much smaller variation of the cold
chamber internal temperature and electrical energy consumption economy of 35.24% in
comparison with the traditional on-off system. While in ,the authors proposed a LQR
methodology to deal with the fast dynamics in the vapor compression cycle and slow
dynamics associated with the indoor environments. The control experiments indicate that the
proposed controller can regulate the indoor temperatures and maintain the steady-state
superheat temperatures at acceptable levels. A robust control algorithm for regulating VSRS
was proposed. The experiment and simulation results indicate that the proposed model offers
more tractable means for describing the actual VSRS comparing to other models.

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A multi-input multi-output (MIMO) controller based on a physical model to regulate the
speeds of compressor and supply fan in a DEAC system was designed by .The simulated
results agreed well with the experimental data, suggesting that the model developed was able
to capture the transient characteristics of the system modeled. While designed MIMO
controller based on the linearized dynamic model of the DEAC system. The Linear Quadratic
Gaussian (LQG) technique was used in designing the MIMO-based controller. The controller
could effectively control the indoor air temperature and humidity simultaneously by varying
compressor speed and supply fan speed of the system. Also a MIMO controller based on
LQG technique using a Kalman filter for the estimator was designed for RSs . It was found
that the model reproduces the experimental trends of the working pressures and power
consumption with a maximum deviation of ±5%. The controller could not apply for
superheating degrees lower than 9.5 °C, where both the controlled system and the control
signal became unstable.
A control strategy with flow distribution capability was proposed for multi-evaporator ACs.
The structure of control strategy was based on a low-order, linear model identified from
experiments. Experiments indicate that the proposed strategy could successfully regulate the
indoor temperatures. A switching control strategy for vapor compression refrigerators was
put forward by acting concurrently on the compressor speed and EEV opening and evaluated
. Despite of the poor energy performance achieved using the switching control approach, the
controller was shown to be able to drive the system toward the reference rapidly and also to
reject the imposed disturbances satisfactorily. A capacity control algorithm, which imitated
on-off control of a single evaporator AC system in each indoor unit of a multi-evaporator AC
system by using VSC and EEV. Controllability tests under various settings for
experimentally validating the control algorithm were carried out. Simulations and control
loops with optimal control strategy of a new AC system were presented. The tests results
showed that all the zones of the combined system could be maintained at their specific set-
points within a small error.

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CONCLUSION
Refrigeration systems control is a nonlinear control problem due to the complicated
relationship between its components and parameters. The studies that have been carried out in
refrigeration control systems cover a broad range of issues and challenges. Many different
control methods for electronic expansion valve and compressor have been developed and
research to improve control methods is continuing. Most of these approaches require system
models, and some of them cannot achieve satisfactory performance under the changes of
various operating conditions. While soft computing methods like fuzzy or artificial neural
network control don’t need a precise model.

REFERENCES
[1] Duan, Y. Y. "Current status and development of air-conditioning load predicting",
Refrigeration and Air Conditioning, 3, pp. 300-304, 2012.
[2] Aprea, C., Renno, C., "Experimental modelling of variable speed system", Int. J. Energy
Res., 33, pp. 29-37, 2009.
[3] Sahin, S., Ekren, O., Isler, Y., Güzeliş, C. "Design and Implementation of Artificial
Neural Networks Controller via a Real-Time Simulator for Variable Speed Refrigeration
Systems", J. of Eng. and Machinery, 51, pp. 8-15, 2010.
[4] Ekren, O., Sahin, S., Isler, Y. "Comparison of Different Controllers for Variable Speed
Compressor and Electronic Expansion Valve", Int. J. Refrigeration, 33 (6), pp. 1161-1168,
2010.
[5] Ekren, O., Sahin, S., Isler, Y. "Experimental Development of Transfer Functions for
Variable Speed Chiller System", Proceedings of the IMechE Part E: Journal of Process
Mechanical Eng., 226 (3), pp. 216-228, 2012.
[6] Aprea, C.,Mastrullo, R.,Renno, C. "Determination of the optimal working of compressor",
Appl. Therm. Eng. 29, pp. 1991-1997, 2009.
[7] Orhan Ekren, Savas Sahin, Yalcin Isler "Operation of Compressor and Electronic
Expansion Valve via Different Controllers", Fuzzy Logic-Controls, Concepts, Theories and
Applications, pp. 223- 236, 2012.

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