2023ICERD8-C35 -- Process for Selecting Best Refrigerant for High-Ambient Temperature Environments

Selecting alternative refrigerants has been a cumbersome process when taking all the criteria such as performance, availability, cost, and environmental impact into consideration. “The Total Equivalent Warming Impact (TEWI)” is an example that is used to measure the greenhouse gases emissions during the lifetime of a refrigerant in a given machine. It reflects the global warming impact of a certain refrigerant. However, TEWI does not capture other factors which may affect appropriate refrigerant selection especially at high ambient temperatures. Thus, a comprehensive amalgamation of the refrigerants properties is necessary to characterize its overall applicability. In this paper, a scoring measure that reflects the combined effect of a refrigerants environmental, performance, thermodynamic, safety, availability, and economic properties, is developed to enable the selection of suitable refrigerants for hot ambient countries. A realistic vapor-compression cycle is simulated at a high ambient temperature to determine refrigerant thermodynamic properties, meanwhile other relevant data points are collected with a high degree of confidence. All these variables are included in a systematic scoring system named Refrigerant Local Sustainability Score, "RLSS.” This method can be used to rank existing and future refrigerant suitability to ease decision makers and to help in selecting alternative future refrigerants.