Historical and present developments of ejector refrigeration systems with emphasis on transcritical carbon dioxide air-conditioning applications

This paper gives an overview of historical and present developments on how ejectors can be utilized to improve the performance of air-conditioning and refrigeration systems. Research on ejector refrigeration cycles that utilize low-grade energy sources to produce cooling is summarized. Another major class of ejector refrigeration cycles that is described tries to recover expansion work by means of a two-phase ejector. This particular approach appears to be very promising for transcritical carbon dioxide (CO₂, R744) systems with inherently large throttling losses. The paper further presents the latest analytical and experimental results of a comprehensive study carried out to investigate possible performance improvements of transcritical R744 two-phase ejector systems. Relevant operational parameters were varied and effects on performance resulting from different ejector geometries were studied as well. Two-phase mixing shock waves inside the ejector were detected by recoding static wall pressure distributions.