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In the past, refrigeration equipment designers have based their work mainly on their company background and on direct experimentation. To effectively reduce development costs, meet new standards and regulations, and continuously improve the efficiency and quality of their products, refrigerant equipment designers must turn more and more to the use of modern simulation tools.
After many years of research, development and full validation IMST-ART© is ready to enter the market and become the professional tool that refrigeration equipment designers demand.
IMST-ART© is an advanced performance simulation, computer-aided engineering design system. IMST-ART© combines accurate and fast algorithms, easy-to-use graphical interface and powerful analysis capabilities into a single software package suitable for modelling any vapour-compression refrigeration system operating with any refrigerant and secondary fluids.
IMST-ART© is appropriate for an extremely wide range of applications.
The principal feature of IMST-ART© is its accurate evaluation of the refrigeration unit performance including an accurate modelling of every single component at the same time. Thus, any modification in one or several components can be always assessed from the perspective of the global performance of the unit.
IMST-ART© includes a HE model based on the discretization of the HE in cells throughout the refrigerant and secondary fluid paths, assuming one-dimensional flow. The model is able to take into account both heat transfer and pressure drop, with local evaluation of the heat transfer coefficient and friction factor, by built in correlations, as well as that of the fluid properties. This model is able to consider most of the geometrical and operation parameters of current evaporators and condensers.
IMST-ART© has been fully checked against numerical troubles and has undergone an extensive experimental validation.
IMST-ART© has been designed to combine high accuracy with a low CPU time in order to become a truly practical tool to support the design of refrigeration equipment. IMST-ART© is able to calculate a complete refrigeration system, including the detailed modelling of the HEs, in less than 20 seconds. Once minimally adjusted, predicted results show a good agreement with experimental results with typical maximum deviations around 5%.
Numerical robustness is another special feature of IMST-ART©: if the real system is able to work under the specified operating conditions, IMST-ART© will find the solution.
IMST-ART has the flexibility for the design and simulation of a vast range of refrigeration equipment based on the single vapour compression cycle. These include:
Equipment design is normally a compromise between conflicting requirements. IMST-ART allows for a complete assessment of the system based on the following:
The advanced graphical capabilities of IMST-ART© make it straightforward to plot any of these parameters against one another or selected design parameters for comparison and reporting purposes.
IMST-ART© can be easily adjusted to reproduce an existing installation. It is an excellent tool to analyze the causes underlying anomalous performance, verify the correct operation of measurement transducers or predict performance and fluid conditions under any hypothetical operating conditions.
IMST-ART© facilitates the declaration of any combination of design or operation parameters as variables for parametric studies, as well as the definition of their corresponding variation range. Moreover, IMST-ART© automatically performs the calculation of every specified combination of parameters and presents the results. The user is then able to comfortably produce graphs of any result against the studied cases or the selected parameter.
IMST-ART© employs independent databases for storing the information of the different components of the system: compressor, evaporator and condenser. The user can load and use or modify at convenience any previously stored component. Design work is thus much more efficient and comfortable since the user needs only to define the range of variation of the selected design parameters and then analyze their effect on the performance.
Throughout the entire procedure, the designer will be able to accurately judge the convenience of any design modification, decide which is the most appropriated component among the possibilities for the given case or, for instance, optimize the design of a heat exchanger in order to maximize efficiency.
Refrigeration equipment is intrinsically complex. In IMST-ART© great emphasis has been placed on rationally organizing the results of the simulation, enhancing the graphical capabilities of the program to help the designer to understand what takes place inside the system, clarifying the reasons for the observed performance or efficiency changes. The graphical capabilities of IMST-ART© permit the plotting of the evolution of any result versus any variable or versus the studied design or operation parameters.
Capabilities for analysis include: