Exergy analysis of a domestic refrigerator with brazed plate heat exchanger as condenser

Domestic refrigeration system is one of the major energy-consuming devices. Improving its energy and exergy efficiencies plays a vital role in the energy conservation strategies on domestic energy sector. One of the methods to improve the performance is the replacement of existing components and operation of the system in low condensing pressure. Therefore, in this work, the conventional air-cooled condenser has been replaced with water-cooled brazed plate heat exchanger. Besides the COP, exergy efficiency and irreversibility in all the basic components of a 190-L domestic refrigerator have been studied. The experimental results show that the COP and exergy efficiency of the proposed system are 52–68 and 46–55 %, respectively. This is higher than that of the conventional system. Moreover, the irreversibility of the proposed system is 34 % less than that of the conventional system, and the exergy efficiency of HC mixture is 4–7 % higher than R134a under similar operating conditions.