Paper No 1044 – Development of a Refrigerant Evaluation Tool for Air Conditioners – 14th IEA Heat Pump Conference, Chicago, USA
In order to prevent global warming, there is a strong need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption of refrigeration and air conditioning systems. Various new low-GWP refrigerants are being introduced for air-conditioning equipment, such as residential and commercial air-conditioners. The performance of these new working fluids should be effectively evaluated to select their most suitable implementation case and reduce the environmental footprint of this technological field. The actual operation performance of air-conditioning equipment is substantially affected not only by the system design and the properties of the refrigerant, but also by the climate and load conditions of the specific installation. Therefore, a refrigerant evaluation tool may take advantage from the cost effectiveness and flexibility of a reliable simulation platform but requires standardized calculation conditions for achieving unbiased results. Therefore, a system simulator was hence developed for the analysis of next-generation refrigerants, including zeotropic mixtures. This paper discusses about validity verification results of this evaluation tool based on experimental results and assess the performance of residential air conditioners.