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April 10, 2003
Fujitsu General Limited
Public Relations Division
Fujitsu General Ltd. has developed a simulator for the heat
exchangers of air conditioners.
In conjunction with Shanghai Jiaotong University in P.R. China,
Fujitsu General Ltd is the first in the world to use "Object Oriented Programming
(OOP)".
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Fujitsu General Ltd. has developed a simulator for a heat exchanger,
which is a key device in air-conditioners. Fujitsu General Ltd.
is the first company in the world to use "Object Oriented
Programming (OOP)"which is the fruition of joint research
and development between Fujitsu General Ltd and Shanghai Jiaotong
University in P. R. China .This research began in April 2002,
and will be presented in the 3rd International Conference on Cryogenics
and Refrigeration (ICCR'2003), which was scheduled to be held
on April but postponed to this autumn.
We have kicked off the technology to develop our air-conditioner.
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| 1:Background of the development |
The design, good or bad, of heat exchangers has a big influence
on the performance of an air-conditioner. It became a prime task
to develop a heat exchange simulator which could cut back on the
number of experimental production units and to improve the quality
of design, in order to develop and produce highly efficient green
heat exchangers at a moderate price.The experimental production
costs are high and duration of tests can be long, particularly when
developing heat exchangers for middle or large size air-conditioners
of limited numerical quantity. The simulators using conventional
"Procedure Oriented Programming" are difficult to correspond
quickly to data change of constituents such as shape, size of cupper
pipe, aluminum fin and various refrigerants etc., so there was no
appropriate simulator for heat exchanger in this field.
Fujitsu General Ltd. made an agreement with Shanghai Jiaotong
University on April 2002 to solve the problems. Together, they
started to develop a simulator for the heat exchanger of air-conditioners.
The collaboration of the background of outstanding development
and production power of FGL and excellent simulation technologies
of Shanghai Jiaotong University, succeeded in developing a world
first simulator for heat exchangers applying the "Object
Oriented Programming", which is scarcely influenced by data
change of constituents.
*1 Based on our survey on April 2003 at the moment.
*2 "Object Oriented" is the concept using the mutual
relations among "objects" as a substitute for procedure
of data processing and system operation.
*3 "Object Oriented Programming" is a programming, which
uses the concept of "Object Oriented".
*4 "Process Oriented Programming" is a programming which
uses procedure of data processing and system operation.
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| 2 :Results of collaboration and the feature
of the heat exchanger simulator |
- Results of collaboration:
- It is important to group the functions such as structure
of heat exchanger, operating conditions, the properties
of refrigerant and air, and so forth into independent ones
(object), so as to apply "OOP" to optimize a heat exchanger
design by changing data of the constituents. We are able
to simulate a heat exchanger efficiently without any influence
of data changes of constituents, bringing the characteristics
of "OOP" into play by grouping objects consisting of "components"
such as copper pipe and aluminum fin etc., "evaporation
function" and "condensation function" in our new heat exchanger
simulator. When to change the data of constituents we have
succeeded to use the simulator without any modification
of the simulator but only by adding and/or changing data
in the corresponding groups (class) according to the new
design.
- The software of "REFPROP", which becomes a
global standard of thermodynamic and transport properties
of refrigerants and refrigerant mixtures data base, is used
to simulate a heat exchanger. But the "REFPROP"
is written by "FORTRAN" (Procedure Oriented Language),
so it is impossible to call "REFPROP" directly
under C++ (Language for OOP). To solve the problem we have
developed a new means of data transmission named "Data
calling between different languages", which can call
the "REFPROP" written by FORTRAN under "C++".
By the new method we can call the properties of refrigerants
in "REFPROP" easily and efficiently, and have
achieved to apply "OOP" to our heat exchanger
simulator.
*5 Procedure Oriented Language is the one, which gives description
of the computer processing procedure as the aggregation
of instructions describing the procedures.
- The features of our heat exchanger simulator
The heat exchanger simulator applied "OOP" can,
- Correspond to data change of constituents of heat exchanger
easily and make productivity better.
- Do maintenance easily since the influence of data change
of constituents is small.
- Make the simulator upgrade easily.
Because of above reasons development period of heat exchangers
is expected to cut down and this technology has expansibility
that "OOP" may be applied to a simulator for refrigeration cycle.
(Up to now it has taken several hours to few days, but the simulator
can measure the same performances of it in few minutes.)
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2 patents are under application at the moment.
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- To develop more accurate heat exchanger simulator using "OOP".
- We will develop new efficient air-conditioners for Chinese
market by using the simulator collaborated with Shanghai Jiaotong
University.
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