Experimental study of ice slurry performance in a standard fan coil

A commercial fan coil has been experimentally studied in this work in order to assess its behaviour when ice slurry is used as secondary refrigerant. Experimentally obtained results have been compared to theoretical prediction obtained using the correlations proposed in previous papers in order to verify them. Several reasons have been reported to explain the deviation of fan coil behaviour from that expected and which make the direct application of ice slurry inappropriate in the fan coil studied. In order to avoid those problems and to establish a comparison between two secondary refrigerants with similar cold storage capacity, ice slurry direct application has been compared to ice slurry indirect application – only carrier fluid, without ice particles, flowing through the fan coil. The most remarkable conclusion obtained is that indirect application improves the behaviour of the fan coil studied for all the cases analysed, overcoming the problems reported for direct application.