Review: Condensation and Evaporation Characteristics of Low GWP Refrigerants in Plate Heat Exchangers

In this paper, condensation and evaporation characteristics of low global warming potential (GWP) refrigerants such as R-1234yf and R-1234ze series are reviewed. This review focuses on heat transfer and pressure drop in plate heat exchangers. Mass flux is considered as an important factor while saturation temperature is not for condensation and evaporation process in plate heat exchangers. The dryout phenomenon occurs occasionally and gives greatly harmful impact on evaporation heat transfer. It is found that R-1234yf and R-1234ze(E) give slightly lower heat transfer performance than R-134a for both condensation and evaporation processes. Generally, low GWP refrigerants presented in this review give lower heat transfer coefficient and higher frictional pressure drop than the conventional refrigerants. Nevertheless, R-1234ze(Z) gives superior heat transfer performance than other refrigerants in condensation. R-32 gives remarkable performance in evaporation, but it gives relatively high GWP compared to other low GWP refrigerants.