Thermodynamic analysis of novel mixtures including siloxanes and cyclic hydrocarbons for high-temperature heat pumps

Abstract

This paper presents the investigation of zeotropic binary fluid mixtures containing cyclohexane (critical temperature above 200 °C) as the base fluid with R600, R600a, R601, R601a, R1336mzz(Z), R1234ze(Z), R1233zd(E) and cyclopropane (critical temperatures between 100 °C and 200 °C). For pure components and their mixtures, the performance of the vapor compression system with an internal heat exchanger was analysed at 50 °C and 80 °C heat source and sink inlet, respectively. Variation of the heat source temperature difference and the internal heat exchanger pinch point temperature difference at supply temperatures (140–170 °C) were also investigated. A pinch point temperature difference of 5 K was maintained for the evaporator and condenser. An increase of 6.59 % in COP was obtained with the zeotropic mixture of cyclohexane/cyclopropane compared to that of pure cyclopropane. The design point analysis showed that increasing the heat source temperature difference and internal heat exchanger pinch point temperature difference reduces the COP. The adopted mixture criteria increased the performance between 3.23 % and 3.91 % with respect to standard working fluids like R1233zd(E) and R601, for a 170 °C supply temperature. With this promising thermodynamic analysis in a subcritical operation, the cyclohexane/cyclopropane mixture has prospect of full integration heat pump design.