Radiative Efficiency Estimation of Organic Substance Based on Group Contribution Method

Abstract

The development of organic working fluid has entered the environment protection era. Ozone depletion potential (ODP) and global warming potential (GWP) are two most important indices of the organic working fluid. Nowadays, more and more attention has been paid to GWP. The calculation of GWP is an extremely complicated process which involves interactions between surface and atmosphere such as atmospheric radiative transfer and atmospheric chemical reactions. GWP of a substance is related to its atmospheric abundance and is a variable in itself. However, radiative efficiency is an intermediate parameter for GWP calculation and it is a constant value used to describe inherent property of a substance. In this paper, the group contribution method was adopted to estimate the radiative efficiency of the organic substance which contains more than one carbon atom. In most cases, the estimation value and the standard value are in a good agreement and most errors are less than 20%, and the biggest estimation error occurs in the estimation of the radiative efficiency of fluorinated ethers which contains several carbon atoms because of the complicated structure of fluorinated ethers compared with hydrocarbon. This estimation method can be used to predict the radiative efficiency of newly developed organic working fluids and its accuracy can meet the requirement of engineering application.