Numerical analysis of the frosting performance of the air-side of a heat pump.

This work is dealing the frosting model based on the analytical approximations of the heat and mass transfer equations, which is validated on the generic reference case of frost creation over a flat horizontal surface. This model has been implemented into a general purpose computational fluid dynamics (CFD) open source platform. Subsequently, this approach has been deployed in the parametric study of the heat exchanger fin geometries, aiming at their design with respect to the frosting characteristics. The obtained results are compared to the experimental observations for the frosting performance of actual heat exchangers.