Abstract
Supermarket refrigeration systems have high environmental impact due to their large refrigerant charge and high leak rates. Consequently, the interest in using low GWP refrigerants such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and new refrigerant blends is increasing. In this paper, an open-source Life Cycle Climate Performance (LCCP) framework is presented and used to compare the environmental impact of four supermarket refrigeration systems: a transcritical CO2 booster system, a cascade CO2/N-40 system, a combined secondary circuit with central DX N-40/L-40 system, and a baseline multiplex direct expansion system utilizing R-404A and N-40. The study is performed for different climates within the USA using EnergyPlus to simulate the systems' hourly performance. Further analyses are presented such as parametric, sensitivity, and uncertainty analyses to study the impact of different system parameters on the LCCP.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 154-164 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | International Journal of Refrigeration |
| Volume | 56 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 18 2015 |
Funding
This work was supported in part by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the Integrated Systems Optimization Consortium (ISOC) at the University of Maryland, College Park . The authors also acknowledge the support of Building Technologies Office of the U.S. Department of Energy for their financial support. Furthermore, the authors acknowledge the support of Samuel Yana Motta, Ankit Sethi, and Honeywell International Inc. for their in-kind and technical support.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| U.S. Department of Energy | |
| Oak Ridge National Laboratory | |
| Building Technologies Office |
Keywords
- Alternative refrigerant
- Environmental impact
- GWP
- LCCP
- Supermarket refrigeration
