AN EVALUATION OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF COMMERCIAL REFRIGERATION SYSTEMS USING ALTERNATIVE REFRIGERANTS

This study introduces a newly developed open source framework to evaluate the Life Cycle Climate Performance (LCCP) of commercial refrigeration systems. This LCCP framework is used to compare the environmental impact of three typical commercial refrigeration system configurations: central direct expansion (DX), distributed DX, and combined secondary circuit (medium temperature) with central DX (low temperature). The environmental impact of the first two systems is compared using three refrigerants: R-404A, R-407F, and N-40. The third system is evaluated using L-40 in the high stage of the secondary circuit MT system while the standard DX (LT) employs the three refrigerants listed above. The evaluations are performed for six US cities and the hourly energy consumption of the systems, required for calculation of indirect emissions, is determined using EnergyPlus. The results include a sensitivity analysis to identify the relative importance of refrigerant charge and electricity production emissions when using lower GWP refrigerants.