WOS: 000459361300010For more than a decade, there is a great demand for finding environmentally-friendly refrigerants obeying the global warming potential value restrictions of the tough environmental legislation. Among the candidate working fluids, R744 (carbon dioxide or CO2), R170 (ethane), and R41 (fluoromethane) are selected to be investigated parametrically in this paper. Performance comparison is made for these three working fluids individually in both transcritical (supercritical) refrigeration cycle and modification of this cycle with ejector expansion. As the first step, the effects of the gas cooler outlet temperature, evaporator temperature, and evaporator outlet superheat temperature difference on the overall performance and percentage expansion losses are investigated within a specific gas cooler pressure range. Evaporator outlet superheat temperature difference is found to be the least effective parameter on the performance; hence, secondly, the transcritical ejector expansion refrigeration cycle is analyzed considering only evaporator temperature and gas cooler outlet temperature based on the same gas cooler pressure ranges. Thermodynamic models are constructed in Matlab (R) and the ejector equations for the ejector expansion refrigeration cycle are established with reference to constant pressure mixing assumption. Comparisons of the performance, percentage expansion losses, and performance improvement potential through the implementation of the ejector instead of the expansion valve among these three refrigerants having low critical temperatures represent the main objective of the paper in order to make contributions to the previous researches in the literature.Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK)Turkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Arastirma Kurumu (TUBITAK) [116M367]The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) under Grant No: 116M367
