Electronic expansion valve mass flow rate prediction based on dimensionless correlation and ANN model

Abstract Refrigerant mass flow rate through electronic expansion valve (EEV) makes significant sense for refrigeration system intelligent control and energy conservation. Objectives of this study were to present experimental data of R134a mass flow rate through EEV and to develop models for EEV mass flow rate prediction via two approaches: dimensionless correlation based on Buckingham π-theorem and artificial neural network (ANN) model based on dimensionless parameters. The database utilized for model training and test was comprised of our experimental data and data available in open literatures including R22, R407C, R410A and R134a. Compared with three existing dimensionless correlations, the proposed dimensionless correlation and ANN model demonstrated higher accuracy. The proposed dimensionless correlation gave mean relative error (MRE) of 6.60%, relative mean square error of (RMSE) 12.05 kg h−1 and correlation coefficient (R2) of 0.9810. The ANN model with the configuration of 8-6-1 showed MRE, RMSE and R2 of 3.97%, 7.59 kg h−1 and 0.9924, respectively.

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