Experimental and Theoretical Investigations of Single- and Two-Phase Refrigeration Systems

This paper presents experimental and thermodynamic investigations of the performance of commercial refrigeration systems with capacities varying from 6 to 26 tons of refrigeration. The analysis considers a critical comparison between the conventional and widely used single-phase approach with the actual multi-phase methodology. The tests were performed under practical conditions with state-of-the-art experimental setups using variable cooling loads. The tests were performed in a climate chamber with advanced ambient temperature and humidity control equipment, where temperature can be raised up to 65 °C, and humidity can vary from 10 to 90%. This enabled us to simulate a wide range of operating modes to validate the performances of the proposed two-phase refrigeration system with theoretical results obtained from single-phase modeling. It was also found that the refrigeration system with a larger cooling capacity exhibited an operational performance close to two-phase theoretical results more than the small refrigeration system capacity. The experimental results were found to comply with the theoretical results with an error of approximately 10% for the two-phase approach compared to an error of approximately 20% for the single-phase approach.