Exergo-economic trade-offs for cold climate heat pumps with low-GWP and natural refrigerants

摘要

Energy consumption and environmental concerns are two of the main drivers to optimize heat pump systems.Moreover, under extreme winter weather conditions, conventional heat pump systems experience challengesas ambient temperatures fall below 0°C (32°F). Yet, electrification efforts call for cold-climate heat pumpsystems. In this work, an economized vapor injected heat pump has been optimized at low ambient conditionsby using low-GWP working fluids including R-32, R-290, R-410A, R-454A and R-452B. In particular, exergoeconomicanalyses have been conducted and a multi-objective optimization study based on a nondominatedsorting genetic algorithm Ⅱ (NSGA-Ⅱ) was used to obtain the Pareto-Frontier curves. The results despite thehigh investment cost, the system operating with R-290 attained the maximum system COP_H, whereas theminimum cost can be obtained using R-32.