Abstract The compressor of a refrigerator accounts for approximately 60-80% of the total energy consumption necessary for the refrigeration cycle. This study investigates the implementation of a pre-compression system featuring a vibrating nozzle, with the goal of enhancing the efficiency of a linear compressor. By utilizing this pre-compression system, the cooling capacity and efficiency of the compressor are expected to improve. The numerical results show that the pre-compression system leads to an improvement of approximately 1.7% in cooling capacity compared to the baseline model. Furthermore, an increase of approximately 0.1 in EER was observed, confirming the feasibility of incorporating a pre-compression system with a vibrating nozzle.

Refrigerators used in homes occupy a large portion of the power consumption. In addition, most of the power consumption of the refrigerator is used by the compressor. Therefore, it is necessary to study on the improvement of compressor efficiency to save energy. In this study, the suction system was changed to improve the efficiency of the linear compressor. For this, numerical analysis was performed by linking the 1 dimensional lumped model and the 2 dimensional axisymmetric CFD model. The numerical analysis results were also compared with the experimental results. As a result of the numerical analysis, the model with modified suction system increased EER by about 0.25% compared to the basic model, which was also confirmed by experiment.