Experimental comparison of R290 and R600a and prediction of performance with machine learning algorithms

The use of alternative refrigerants is among the popular topics of the refrigeration industry. In the first part of this study, thermodynamic performances of R290 and R600a gases were compared in a vapor compression refrigeration experiment setup. Although R600a caused an average of 33.44% less compressor power consumption compared to R290 refrigerant, R290 provided an average of 23.77% increase in COP (coefficient of performance), 82.55% in cooling capacity, and 20.99% increase in second law efficiency compared to R600a. In the second part of the study, the performance parameters of the refrigeration system were predicted with MLP (multi-layer perceptron), SVM (support vector machine), and DT (decision tree) machine learning algorithms. It was detected that the SVM method predicted all parameters with the least error. MAE (mean absolute error) values detected in the COP prediction with test set were 0.0317, 0.0324, and 0.0989 for SVM, MLP, and DT, respectively. Results revealed that performance of the refrigeration system increased when utilizing R290, and SVM was superior in prediction of performance indicators compared to other machine learning methods.