PERFORMANCE OF HC AND HFC REFRIGERANTS IN A FINNED-TUBE EVAPORATOR AND ITS EFFECT ON SYSTEM EFFICIENCY

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