Comparative experimental study of low GWP alternative for R134a in a walk-in cold room

• A commercial vapor compression system used using R1234ze is studied and compared with R134a.
• It is significantly recorded that R1234ze has high COP about 7–33% than that of R134a.
• It has high COP at higher Te and its Qc. is comparable in compared with R134a.
• An exergy analysis revealed higher second law efficiency for R1234ze.

The environmental problems induced by the ongoing increase in the global worming potential (GWP) pose a significant interest among researchers. It was found that, the currently used refrigerants are with high GWP (National Refrigerants Inc., 2004), so that it becomes necessary to search for alternatives to these refrigerants that can properly operate on the same systems but with low GWP. Therefore a walk-in cold room working with vapor compression cycle is constructed and tested in this paper. The performance of R134a refrigerant with high GWP is compared to another low GWP refrigerant R1234ze in a trail to provide a solution of the problem of high GWP of refrigerants currently used in cold rooms. The results obtained in this study have shown that, the cooling capacity of R1234ze was lower than that of R134a by 2% to 13%. The lowest evaporating temperature that could be reached for R1234ze is −13 °C while the lowest temperature of R134a is −30 °C. Regarding the power consumption, R1234ze has lower power consumption than R134a by about 9% to 15% therefore it can be concluded that R 1234ze can be recommended to be used at high and medium evaporating temperature after carrying out the suitable modifications on the refrigeration cycle.