Experimental study on performance of automotive air conditioning system using R-152a refrigerant

Recently, as climate changes have manifested worldwide, every country is making efforts to prevent ozone depletion and global warming. In the automotive industry, R-134a refrigerant is widely used in air conditioning systems because it has zero ozone depletion potential (ODP). Unfortunately, its global warming potential (GWP) is high. Therefore, alternative refrigerants are needed as a replacement for R-134a. R-152a is considered to be one of the better alternative refrigerants due to zero ODP and low GWP. In this paper, the performance of an automotive air conditioning system using R-134a and one using R-152a are compared experimentally at the bench level. The experimental apparatus simulated a real automotive air conditioning system consisting of a cabin and engine room structure. The cooling capacity, condensing capacity, coefficient of performance (COP) and power consumption characteristics of the automotive air conditioning system are evaluated by changing the air velocity entering the condenser and the compressor rotation speed with the optimized refrigerant charge amount. Also, the performance of the R-152a system was investigated by changing the thermostatic expansion valve which is set of values. The results of this study show that the R-152a system is slightly better than the R-134a system, not only under driving conditions but also under idling condition. R-152a refrigerant thus shows promise as an alternative refrigerant to replace the current standard, R-134a, in automotive air conditioning systems.