Improvements in CO2 Booster Architectures with Different Economizer Arrangements

Abstract

CO2 transcritical booster architectures are widely analyzed to be applied in centralized commercial refrigeration plants in consonance with the irrevocable phase-out of HFCs. Most of these analyses show the limitations of CO2 cycles in terms of energy efficiency, especially in warm countries. From the literature, several improvements have been proposed to raise the booster efficiency in high ambient temperatures. The use of economizers is an interesting technique to reduce the temperature after the gas cooler and to improve the energy efficiency of transcritical CO2 cycles. The economizer cools down the high pressure’s line of CO2 by evaporating the same refrigerant extracted from another point of the facility. Depending on the extraction point, some configurations are possible. In this work, different booster architectures with economizers have been analyzed and compared. From the results, the combination of the economizer with the additional compressor allows obtaining energy savings of up to 8.5% in warm countries and up to 4% in cold countries with regard to the flash-by-pass arrangement and reduce the volumetric displacement required of the MT compressors by up to 37%.