Performance comparison of single-stage mixed-refrigerant Joule–Thomson cycle and pure-gas reverse Brayton cycle at fixed-temperatures from 80 to 180 K

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Performance comparison of single-stage mixed-refrigerant Joule–Thomson refrigeration cycle (MJTR) and pure-gas reverse Brayton cycle (RBC) at fixed-temperatures from 80 to 180 K was made in this paper. The simulation was mainly conducted under nonideal conditions with extrinsic irreversibilities. Exergy efficiency and volumetric cooling capacity are two main evaluation parameters. Exergy loss distributions along the cycles were analyzed. Under ideal conditions, RBC achieved the highest exergy efficiency at all temperatures, but lower volumetric cooling capacity than MJTR at middle-high temperatures. Under nonideal conditions, both the exergy efficiency and volumetric cooling capacity of MJTR were obviously superior to RBC from 100 to 180 K, but inferior to RBC at 80 K. Two reasons account for the sharp performance degradation of MJTR: The high fraction of neon resulted in large entropy generation and exergy loss in throttling process. Larger recuperator duty and WLMTD lead to larger losses in the recuperator.