Investigation of the Environmentally-Friendly Refrigerant R152a for Air Conditioning Purposes

Heat pumps are efficient and well-established technologies for providing the proper cooling load in the building sector. The objective of this work is the parametric investigation of a heat pump operating with the promising refrigerant R152a for different operating conditions. More specifically, the heat pump is studied for different ambient temperatures, different indoor temperatures and various compressor rotational speeds. The cooling capacity and the coefficient of performance (COP) are the most important parameters which calculated in every scenario. A detailed model is developed in Engineering Equations Solver (EES) and it is validated with literature data. According to the final results, the system can operate in nominal conditions with 5 kW cooling capacity and a COP equal to 6.46. It is found that the COP can be ranged from 4 to 12 and the cooling capacity, while the cooling capacity can reach up to 9 kW. Moreover, a regression equation about the performance of the system is suggested. The obtained results indicate that the use of the R152a leads to high performance and so it can be an environmentally friendly choice for the cooling systems.