An experimental investigation of the global environmental impact of the R22 retrofit with R422D

In recent years a new refrigerant, R422D, has been introduced as substitute of R22 for refrigeration systems. This new fluid is an easy-to-use, non-ozone-depleting HFC refrigerant and, differently from its predecessor (R407C), it is compatible with mineral oil. However, R422D has a very high GWP, and it tends to worsen the efficiency of retrofitted R22 systems. Consequently, even if R422D respects the limits of Montreal Protocol, its global environmental impact could be high. In this paper, we report an experimental analysis in terms of TEWI aimed to identify the global environmental impact of R22 systems retrofitted with R422D. For this purpose, we considered a direct expansion refrigerator for commercial applications and we investigated energy consumption with the temperature of the cold reservoir set to −5, 0, 5, 10°C. The experimental investigation confirmed that the system, when retrofitted with R422D, leads to an increase of TEWI. Therefore an optimization analysis aimed to eco-friendly scenarios was performed.