Investigation on the Performances of Vuilleumier Cycle Heat Pump Adopting Mixture Refrigerants

Abstract: The performances of thermodynamics cycles are dependent on the properties of refrigerants. The performances of Vuilleumier (VM) cycle heat pump adopting mixture refrigerants are analyzed by MATLAB software using REFPROP programming. At given operating parameters and configuration, performances of the VM cycle adopting pure refrigerant, H2, He or N2 are compared. Thermodynamic properties of the four type mixtures, namely, He-H2, He-N2, H2-N2 and He-H2-N2, are obtained with total 16 mixing ratio, and the coefficient of performance and the exergy efficiency of these four mixture types in VM cycle heat pump are calculated. The results indicate that within the temperature of heat source 400–1000 K, helium is the best choice of pure refrigerant for VM cycle heat pump. The He-H2 mixture is the best among all binary refrigerant mixtures; the recommended proportion is 1:2. For trinary refrigerant mixture, suggested proportion of helium, hydrogen and nitrogen is 2:2:1. For these recommended mixtures, system COPs (coefficient of performances) are close to 3.3 and exergy efficiencies are about 0.2, which are close to pure refrigerant helium.