Abstract
Although a transition into several promising HFC alternative refrigerants and their mixtures from conventional CFC and/or HCFC refrigerants is steadily in progress, there still remains a niche to pursue a drop-in refrigerant in some limited engineering applications where the advantage of retrofitting can be emphasized.R-SP34E is one of such drop-in refrigerants to complement R-12 which is a ternary mixture refrigerant consisted of R-134a with minor fractions of propane and ethanol. In this paper, the fundamental thermodynamic properties such as VLE properties and gas-phase PVT properties of R-SP34E are presented. This paper reports the first sets of measured data including 7 dew-and bubble-point pressures and 73 gas-phase PVT properties in the extensive range of temperatures 300-380 K, pressures 0.1-5.2 MPa, and densities up to around the critical density, obtained by employing the Burnett apparatus. In order to complement and confirm the reliability of the measurements, thermodynamic models including a dew-point pressure correlation and a truncated virial equation of state were originally developed in this study. The models were confirmed to exhibit not only excellent reproducibility of the measurements but also the thermodynamic consistency regarding the temperature dependence of the second and third virial coefficients and derived properties such as specific heats or speed of sound. By presenting the reliable thermodynamic model, a systematic information about the thermodynamic properties of R-SP34E is provided in this paper.
