- Author
- Domanski, P. A. | Yashar, D. A. | Kim, M. S.
- Title
- Performance of HC and HFC Refrigerants in a Finned-Tube Evaporator and Its Effect on System Efficiency.
- Coporate
- National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD
- Journal
- International Journal of Refrigeration, Vol. 28, No. 6, 820-827, September 2005
- Book or Conf
- Natural Working Fluids Conference, 6th IIR Gustave Lorentzen. Proceedings. August 29-September 1, 2004, Glasgow, UK, 1-8 p., ['2004', '2005']
- Keywords
- refrigerants | tubes | efficiency | evaporator
- Identifiers
- refrigerant information; simulation and optimization tools; comparison of nine pressure drop correlations; evaporator performance with selected refrigerants; evaporator design information; summary of simulation results for ISHEDI1-optimized designs; impact of evaporator performance on system COP; CYCLE_D; performance for the theoretical cycle and the cycle accounting for evaporator effects; coefficient of performance (COP)
- Abstract
- The paper presents a comparable evaluation of isobutane (R600a), propane (R290), R134a, R22, R410A, and R32 in an optimized finned-tube evaporator, and analyzes the impact of evaporator effects on the system coefficient of performance (COP). The study relied on a detailed evaporator model derived from NIST's EVAP-COND simulation package and used the ISHED1 scheme employing a non-Darwinian Learnable Evolution Model for circuitry optimization. In the process, 4500 circuitry designs were generated and evaluated for each refrigerant. The obtained evaporator optimization results were incorporated in a conventional analysis of the vapor compression cycle. For a theoretical cycle analysis without accounting for evaporator effects, the COP spread for the studied refrigerants was as high as 11.7%. For cycle simulations including evaporator effects, the COP of R290 was better than that of R22 by up to 3.5%, while the remaining refrigerants performed within approximately a 2% COP band of the R22 baseline for the two condensing temperatures considered.