Fan-less Air Conditioning

[klsk8r]

I'm designing a fanless aircondioner using aluminum fins on copper tube as the evaporator without a fan. This finned assembly will mount around a room as a valance and will cool the space by convection. This will pipe the freon directly through the copper. It is not the valance system that is sold by Edwards which uses chilled & heated water.
15 to 20 years ago there were companies selling these systems. One was Wilcox in Clearwater FL. The condenser was also finned cooper, mounted outdoors on a rack, again no fan.
These didn't use Expansion valves, but instead they had a "tilt tank" or a receiver for liquid storage that could be tilted to adjust the rate of expansion and the system charge.
There is a company in Lakeland FL, EarthLink Technologies, selling a direct burial geothermal AC system which uses a conventional airhandler with the expansion valve removed. They use a patented adjustable receiver to adjust the system charge.
Does anyone have knowledge of this valance, fan-less system? Can anyone help with the adjustable receiver design?

 

[ChrisConley]

How do you prevent condesation and/or freezing with refrigerant in the coil? I don't have any experience with the application (other than it sounds interesting).

 

[klsk8r]

The aluminum fins are about 3"H x 2"W and have a "tear drop"
curved bottom. They are pressed on the 5/8 copper, about 42 fins per foot. Below the row of fins, you mount a 3/4" PVC drip pan, (like a 3/4" PVC pipe cut in half, 180 degrees). This drip pan is routed to a drain. This system makes a great de-humidifier. In Florida the fins never freeze up. An outdoor thermostat prevents operation when it's too cold outside to pull in heat (heating mode).
I'm planning to direct bury copper coils in a slinky arrangement instead of the fan-less coils outdoors.
A reversing valve provides the switch between cooling and heating modes.

 

[GMcD]

The biggest issue with that form of cooling unit is the condensation collection and draining the condensate. The problem with the earlier versions of these types of chilled beam style equipment was keeping the condensate pans clean and making sure that organic growth didn't occur in the drain pans. As we all know in this business, preventative maintenance doesn't really occur all that much, and I've seen some condensate drain pans that look like tide pools, and the only reason sculpins weren't spawning in them was the long up hill climb along the drain pipes.

 

[Ziggypump]

This sounds like a chilled beam application. Don't know who you would contact for the equipment you're looking for, but I believe that this application was used in the past, but organic growth, like GMcD said, was an issue, and the ceiling cassettes have replaced them.

I've talked to a contractor that buries copper piping for a geothermal refrigerant (R407) system. A big problem with doing this is that the buried part of the system only allows about 5-6 tons capacity. If you have a way of getting larger capacities out of it, great, I'd love to hear how you plan to set it up. The setup the contractor uses is a sort of vertical well that only goes down 50-60 feet.

The other big problem is corrosion of the copper piping. What are you doing to minimize the copper from corroding underground?