Ejector in R410A vapor compression systems with experimental quantification of two major mechanisms of performance improvement: Work recovery and liquid feeding

•Experimental data presented for an R410A vapor compression system with an ejector.•Two major COP improvements quantified: liquid-fed evaporator and work recovery.•COP increase only due to work recovery ranged from 1.9% to 8.4%.•COP was increased by up to 9.0% only due to flash gas bypass.

This paper presents experimental data and analysis comparing the performance of an R410A ejector vapor compression system to those of a liquid-fed evaporator system and a conventional expansion valve system. The objective was to quantify separately two major improvements of the ejector system: work recovery and liquid-fed evaporator. The ejector system was first compared to a system with liquid-fed evaporator at matching cooling capacities and revealed improvements from 1.9% to 8.4% solely due to the work recovery of the ejector. When compared to a conventional expansion valve system at the same cooling capacity, the ejector setup improved COP from 8.2% to 14.8% due to simultaneous benefits of liquid-fed evaporator and work recovery. Overall ejector efficiencies from 12.2% to 19.2% were achieved.