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.

The new thermal management models of linear compressors have been recently reported. These models adopt the simplified transient flow effects to shorten the excessive analysis time. Among the unsteady flow effects of the linear compressor, the effect of the gap flow between the compressor housing and the body due to the body vibration on the heat transfer performance was studied in this paper. For this study, a numerical analysis for the unsteady axisymmetric flows was performed by using CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics). The results show that the high-speed refrigerant flows occurred in the gap between the compressor housing and the body, which contribute to increasing the heat transfer from high temperature refrigerants in the housing to the outside air. In addition, as the gap decreases, the refrigerant flow rate through the gap increases and the heat transfer rate increases as well.