Effectiveness Simulation of Internal Heat Exchanger (IHX) Combination Investigation on CO2 Refrigeration

Abstract

As natural refrigerant, carbon dioxide has excellent thermo physics, safe, nontoxic and cheap. This reason causes the CO2 becomes the best refrigerant alternatives. However, CO2 refrigeration system still has relatively low performance when operate in hot environment temperature. This study aims is to investigate the performance of CO2 trans critical refrigeration system using Internal Heat Exchanger (IHX) in tropical outdoor temperature and will compare with standard CO2 refrigeration system which has been studied previously. The research will be carried out by theoretical study and numerical analysis of the refrigeration system using the EES (Engineering Equation Solver) program. Data input and simulation validation are obtained from experimental and secondary data. The result shows that the simulation has good agreement with the experimental results. Errors only as much as 1% up to 2 % so it can be argued that the simulation valid for CO2 refrigeration system with IHX combination analysis especially when the system is operated in tropical climate i.e. Indonesia.