Can heat pump technology bring about changes in automobile air conditioning systems?
First, let’s understand the air conditioning system of traditional fuel vehicles:
For traditional fuel vehicle air conditioning and refrigeration systems, the engine drives the compressor to compress the refrigerant into a high-temperature and high-pressure liquid. After passing through the condenser, it becomes a low-temperature and high-pressure liquid. After the volume of the evaporator box expands, the refrigerant can be turned into a low-temperature and low-pressure liquid. Gas, this refrigerant absorbs heat during the evaporation process, thereby cooling the air inside the car.
car heating system
But for electric cars, things change:
For the air conditioning and refrigeration system, the same working principle is still used, except that an electrically driven air conditioning compressor is used. As for the air conditioning and heating system, since there is no engine, a new heating method is adopted. For most current electric vehicles, the PTC water heating method is used, that is, after heating the LLC coolant through an electric heater, the LLC coolant is then used to heat the air. Since the power of ordinary PTC heaters is only a few kilowatts, this method not only has a slower heating rate, but also consumes battery power, resulting in a significant reduction in battery cruising range in winter. Heat pump technology is a new technology designed to solve the drawback of excessive power consumption.
What is heat pump technology?
For traditional fuel vehicles, the refrigerant releases a large amount of heat when it is compressed by the air-conditioning compressor, and almost all of this heat is lost in the atmosphere. The principle of heat pump technology is to make full use of the heat released by the refrigerant when the compressor compresses the low-temperature and low-pressure gas refrigerant into a high-temperature and high-pressure liquid refrigerant, and relies on this part of the heat to heat the air in the car to avoid wasting the heat waste.
PTC+heat pump
However, since the current heat pump technology is not very efficient in utilizing heat, the compromise method is to combine it with PTC water heating. In this way, on the one hand, it can cooperate with PTC water heating technology to quickly increase the temperature in the car, and at the same time, it can turn off the PTC water heating system after the temperature reaches a certain requirement, thereby achieving energy saving.
In fact, heat pump technology is not new. Toyota has adopted this technology in the Prius many years ago. However, for fuel vehicles or hybrid vehicles, the use of this technology will not help much in reducing fuel consumption, and it will also cause The cost of the vehicle has increased, so it has not been widely adopted. But for electric vehicles, this technology can avoid excessive waste of energy caused by electric heating of water and water heating of air. This is of great help in improving cruising range. In the future, more electric vehicles will adopt this technology.
