Transcritical R744 Supermarket Refrigeration System Integrated with a Heat-Driven Ejector Chiller

The subcooling potential of a novel R717-based waste heat-driven multi-ejector chiller (HEC) integrated with an R744 refrigeration system was evaluated for use in supermarkets. The performance was compared with an R744 refrigeration system coupled to R718- and R600a-based HECs, an R744 system equipped with parallel compression (PC), and a standard R744 booster system (CB) in various warm and hot climatic locations. Integration of the R717-based HEC was found to improve the coefficient of performance by 3.7% at 27 °C to 12.1% at 45 °C compared to the R718, and by 1.6% at 27 °C to 7.6% at 45 °C compared to the R600a-based system. The energy-saving potential of the R717 system (6.2% to 9.4%) was also found to be higher than that of the R718 (0.7% to 2.8%) and R600a systems (2.5% to 6.6%). The use of the existing high-pressure controllers of the CB system was found to impose a relatively lower penalty on the system performance compared to the controllers of the PC system. Although the integration of the R718 system incurred a significantly lower additional investment, the recovery time of the R600a-based HEC (2.3–4.8 years) was found to be the shortest.