Optimized Air-to-Refrigerant Heat Exchanger With Low-GWP Refrigerants

Published

August 20, 2016

Author(s)

Piotr A. Domanski, Hong Hyun Cho

Abstract

This paper presents an analytical evaluation of the performance of low-GWP refrigerants in a finned-tube evaporator used for residential cooling applications. The study employed an evolutionary-computation optimization module to examine the effect of a refrigerant circuitry design on performance of twelve R22 and R410A alternative refrigerants. The case study showed that high-pressure fluids benefited most from refrigerant circuitry optimization with R744 achieving a capacity increase of over 13 %. Among lower-pressure fluids, the capacity of R717 evaporator increased by over 10 %. The results show that zeotropic blends with a large temperature glide are particularly sensitive to a layout of refrigerant circuitry and may suffer significant performance degradation in heat exchangers with improper circuitry design.

Proceedings Title

12h IIR Gustav Lorentzen Conference on Natural Working Fluids

Conference Dates

August 21-24, 2016

Conference Location

Edinburgh, UK

Pub Type

Conferences

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Keywords

air conditioning, evaporator, low-GWP refrigerants, optimization, vapor compression cycle

Citation

Domanski, P. and Cho, H. (2016), Optimized Air-to-Refrigerant Heat Exchanger With Low-GWP Refrigerants, 12h IIR Gustav Lorentzen Conference on Natural Working Fluids, Edinburgh, UK, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=920971 (Accessed October 13, 2025)