Second law analysis of an automotive air conditioning system using HFO-1234yf, an environmentally friendly refrigerant

•Exergy analysis of an automotive air conditioning system is done using HFO-1234yf.•HFO-1234yf provides higher exergy efficiency compared to HFC-134a refrigerant.•Maximum entropy generation and exergy destruction occur in the compressor.

In this paper, a comparative study of the second law of thermodynamics is presented to determine the possibility of using HFO-1234yf, an environmentally friendly refrigerant, as a drop-in replacement of HFC-134a in automotive air conditioning system. For the thermodynamic analysis, a computer program is written to simulate the operating conditions of automobile air conditioning system. The thermodynamic properties of the refrigerants are extracted from the REFPROP 8.0 software. For calculating the coefficient of performance (COP), exergy destruction, exergy efficiency and entropy generation, computational models are used to evaluate the effects of different parameters on their changes. It is found that using HFO-1234yf as the air conditioning refrigerant leads to higher exergy efficiency compared to HFC-134a. Also, maximum entropy generation and exergy destruction occur in the compressor. The exergy destruction and entropy generation of the cycle components are less in the case of using HFO-1234yf refrigerant instead of HFC-134a.