Energy efficiency evaluation of CO2 transcritical refrigeration cycles for telecommunication and data centres

There is no need to stress the importance of telecommunication industry in the global economy. Web hotel applications pose a peculiar problem for compensating very high thermal power inside rather restricted spaces. Distinctive features of this refrigerating installations are high evaporation temperature and high flow rate of cooling air, whereas latent heat load is absent. The typical system used in this field is a direct expansion refrigerating unit, with air cooled condenser and operates on R407C refrigerant. Typical values for the evaporation temperature are around 10 degrees C, with the process air cooled down to 26 degrees C, but applications exist with high density of heat load that can operate with 30 divided by 35 degrees C air temperature at the evaporator inlet. Nowadays synthetic refrigerants, such as R407C, are increasingly under pressure from environmentalists and from a greater part of the society in industrialised countries since they raise great concern about the future of the planet, because of their high GWP potential. Natural refrigerants, such as ammonia, hydrocarbon and CO(2) are seen as the ultimate solution for this environmental problem, but the first two fluid hardly can be considered as viable alternative to synthetic refrigerants because their unfavourable safety characteristics. CO(2) is indeed safe, cheap, easily available, its ODP is zero and its GWP is negligible, even zero, if the fluid is recovered from waste of industrial processes; the dark side of CO(2) can be energy efficiency because of its low critical temperature, that often makes the refrigerating machine operate according to a transcritical cycle; this means that high temperature heat rejection does not involve two phase transformation (condensation) but only gas cooling (consequently the heat exchanger is named gas cooler). Nevertheless, according to common opinion, this thermodynamic penalisation can be, at least partially, counterbalanced by its very good characteristics of heat transfer and pressure drop. Another strong point of CO(2) is the possibility of running with a rather low flow rate of the cooling medium at the gas cooler. In any case, the penalisation in energy efficiency with respect to traditional compression vapour inverse cycle is decreasing when the temperature lift from the lower to the upper cycle temperature is shrinking. Since high evaporation temperature is typical of the refrigeration systems in use in web hotel, CO(2) transcritical cycle can be considered an effective alternative to traditional installations. In the paper a theoretical analysis is carried out, aimed at comparing the energy efficiency characteristics of CO(2) transcritical cycle with the ones of the application on the market. Different transcritical cycles are analysed. The effects of independent variable, such as upper and lower cycle pressures and the mass flow rate of air at the heat exchangers are investigated.