PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF A DOMESTIC REFRIGERATOR

Refrigerator is one of the home appliance utilizing mechanical vapour compression
cycle in it process. Performance of the system becomes main issue and many researches
are still ongoing to evaluate and improve efficiency of the system. Therefore, this paper
presents the development process of refrigerator test rig and performance analysis of a
domestic refrigerator. The experiment platform which called test rig was developed
from refrigerator model NRB33TA National brand. The main objective in this study was
to obtain performance of the refrigeration system in term of Refrigeration Capacity,
Compressor work and Coefficient of Performance (COP) by determining three
important parameters during in operating mode which are temperature, pressure and
refrigerant flowrate. In the test rig, all temperature probes were connected to
thermocouple scanner to measure temperature at particular points on the refrigeration
system. Pressure gauges were used to measure pressure and a magnetic flowmeter was
used to measure refrigerant flowrate. In order to avoid effects of a changing the
measured data, the environmental of testing was controlled according to Association of
Home Appliance Manufacturers (AHAM) standard. There are three sets of experiment
data were collected in order to evaluate the refrigerator performance. Each data was
collected for a cycle of operation for 2 hours. The result shows that the average COP of
the refrigeration system using the refrigerator test rig was about 2.7.