Study on the performance of an energy-efficient three-stage auto-cascade refrigeration system enhanced with a pressure regulator

This paper proposed a modified three-stage auto-cascade refrigeration cycle (MTARC) associated with an intermediate pressure regulator. The energy and exergy analyses indicate that the MTARC can acquire lower evaporating temperature, greater cooling capacity and higher COP. Under a typical operating condition, the MTARC using the alternative ternary zeotropic mixture of R1234yf/R41/R14(0.66/0.17/0.17) has an evaporator inlet temperature of −90.90 °C, COP of 0.4509 and exergy efficiency of 40.67%, which are 4.63 °C lower, 32.93% and 15.38% higher than those of the conventional three-stage ARC, respectively. Further research shows that with the decreasing intermediate pressure, the thermodynamic performance of the MARC can be improved significantly, but the compressor exhaust temperature also increases. When the intermediate pressure decreases from 1.8 MPa to 1 MPa, the cooling capacity, COP and exergy efficiency of the MTARC increase by 30.34%, 22.10% and 13.79% respectively, while the exhaust temperature increases 18.59 °C from 116.66 °C to 135.25 °C, which indicates that the selection of intermediate pressure needs to be comprehensively considered. The proposed new approach is valuable for optimizing the design and application of the refrigerator at an ultra-low temperature level of −80 °C.