Vapor Compression Heat Pumps with Refrigerant Mixtures

Covers working fluid mixtures and their applications in vapor compression systems. This book explains in detail the thermodynamics of refrigerant mixtures, as well as the fundamentals of various refrigeration cycles and methods for improving their efficiency.

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Amidst tightening requirements for eliminating CFC’s, HCFC’s, halons, and HFC’s from use in air conditioning and heat pumps, the search began for replacements that are environmentally benign, non-flammable, and similar to the banned refrigerants in system-level behavior. Refrigerant mixtures are increasingly used as working fluids because they demonstrate desirable thermodynamic, feasibility, and safety characteristics.

Vapor Compression Heat Pumps with Refrigerant Mixtures provides the first comprehensive, single-source treatment of working fluid mixtures and their applications in vapor compression systems. The authors explain in detail the thermodynamics of refrigerant mixtures, which is vastly more complex than that of individual refrigerants, as well as the fundamentals of various refrigeration cycles and methods for improving their efficiency. They also include important discussions on heat transfer and pressure drop correlations, experimental performance measurements and examples of using refrigerants and their mixtures, and critical operational issues such as control issues, refrigerant mixing, and mass fraction shifts.

Assembling reviews of the scattered literature on the subject and reflecting two decades of research by the authors, Vapor Compression Heat Pumps with Refrigerant Mixtures prepares you to design and implement systems that take the best advantage of fluid mixtures, confronting the challenges and grasping the opportunities that they present.