Abstract
Natural refrigerant CO2 has become a viable choice for refrigeration units. The CO2 systems are working efficiently on land-based facilities, and their demand is increasing for offshore applications, e.g., cruise ships and fishing vessels, due to their environment-friendly nature and compactness. The investigated application of the CO2 system in this work is a single-stage system for air conditioning and a two-stage system for provision refrigeration at high heat rejection temperatures. The CO2 transcritical cycle allows operating in higher ambient temperatures and in a colder climate with significant heat recovery. However, the system efficiency decreases in higher ambient conditions due to the high-pressure ratio and expansion losses. Therefore, ejectors are implemented to boost the cycle efficiency at high heat rejection temperature conditions. The pressure exchanger (PX) device recently came up and claimed to be an option to recover expansion work in CO2 systems. PX is already in use for reverse osmosis (RO) desalination units to recover pressure work from the high pressure reject concentrate to low-pressure seawater. This work theoretically investigates the implementation of a CO2-PX for transcritical CO2 systems combined with ejectors and compressors. The energy efficiency of alternative system configurations is evaluated for various operating conditions.