Conference Year
2018
Keywords
Refrigeration systems, Carbon Dioxide, Compressors, CO2 booster system with parallel compression, Heat Recovery
Abstract
The demand for natural refrigerants is growing in commercial refrigeration systems. In the recent years, carbon dioxide has increased its market share in the field of commercial refrigeration and has proven to be a viable solution for the replacement of hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) systems. This success is mainly due to the ongoing technological evolution of carbon dioxide refrigeration systems. In the present paper, a CO2 commercial refrigeration unit serving a supermarket located in Northern Italy is presented. The unit consists of a booster compressor rack with parallel compression, with ten compressors arranged to provide around 20 kW cooling capacity at low temperature and 90 kW cooling capacity at medium temperature. Four out of ten compressors, provided by Frascold®, are arranged in parallel. The installation, in addition to the cooling load, provides all the thermal functions in one unit: it integrates a heat exchanger for the air conditioning and the possibility of two stage heat recovery, for sanitary hot water production and for space heating. The refrigeration unit is equipped with pressure and temperature sensors, power consumption and load analysers for the compressors. A computer model has been developed to evaluate the acquired data of the system and to analyse the key parameters. The preliminary results from the monitoring of this unit are presented in this paper and used to calibrate the model of the system. Afterwards, simulations have been performed at variable operating conditions in a cold month to evaluate the performance of the unit. The results of the model have been compared to an independent set of monitoring data.