Volume 6 Issue 3 ( September 2019 )

Air-conditioning system notably contributes to global warming owing to the huge amount of energy consumption. Moreover, this system uses HFC based refrigerants, which have high global warming potential (GWP). This work investigates the direct and indirect impacts of GWP for commercial and residential air-conditioning systems considering the three widely used HFC based refrigerants. The warming impacts are assessed in terms of cooling load, co-efficient of performance (COP), evaporation temperature, and condensation temperature for three different locations in Japan. The indirect emission of the air-conditioning systems (commercial and residential) for different major cities of Japan is estimated in terms of energy demand and hours of operation. The results of this work indicate that the HFC based refrigerants such as R134a and R32 have lower warming impact compared to that of R410A refrigerant. Furthermore, the economic loss due to refrigerant leakage is also assessed.

Keywords: Air-conditioning system; COP; GWP; HFC; TEWI.