STATUS OF THE ROUND-ROBIN ON THE TRANSPORT-PROPERTIES OF R134A

The paper contains a status report on an international project coordinated by the Subcommittee on Transport Properties of Commission I.2 of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. The project has been conducted to investigate the large discrepancies between the results reported by various authors for the transport properties of R134a. The project has involved the remeasurement of the transport properties of a single sample of R134a in nine laboratories throughout the world in order to test the hypothesis that at least part of the discrepancy could be attributed to the purity of the sample. This paper provides an intercomparison of the new experimental results obtained to data in this project for the viscosity and the thermal conductivity in both gaseous and liquid phases. The agreement between the viscosity data from the laboratories contributing to the project was improved with several techniques, now producing consistent results. This suggests that the purity of the samples of R134a used in previous work was at least partly reponsible for the discrepancies observed. For the thermal conductivity in the liquid phase the results of the measurements are also more consistent than before, although not for all experimental techniques. Not all of the previous measurements suffered from significant sample impurities, so the present measurements on a consistent high-purity sample can be used to detect data sets which are outliers, possibly because of impurities. Identification of laboratories and techniques with systematic differences may require the examination of data for several fluids. The implications for future measurements of the transport properties of other refrigerants are significant.