ACR Journal

April | May 2020 AIR CONDITIONING 24 F-Gas and the future of refrigerants Volume 6 No.3 Air conditioning is now a central part of commercial life, and is a feature of modern o ces and commercial properties that we take for granted. Today’s systems o er a highly e ective way of delivering energy e cient cooling and heating. These intelligent and automated units can counter the excess heat produced by IT equipment by cooling down our surroundings, and ensure that o ces provide the level of comfort required for employees to work productively. At the heart of the current debate around air conditioning is continuing to look for ways to make systems more energy e cient – and one way that the industry is working towards this is by altering the refrigerant used in systems. The future of EU legislation We all know that the requirement to move from R410a refrigerant to R32 is due to the significant drop in global warming potential (GWP), as despite the best e orts of Phil Ord, Head of Marketing & Sales Strategy at Mitsubishi Electric UK, says R32 systems are now available for almost every application and can have a major impact on reducing carbon emissions. everyone involved, there remains a potential for refrigerant leakage, and emissions can occur during installation, commissioning and ongoing maintenance of equipment. This is one of the reasons that the EU introduced the original F-Gas Regulation in 2006, with the aim of controlling emissions through improved quality of installations, refrigerant recovery and training. Looking to the future, the F-Gas Regulation is aiming to achieve an 80% cut in emissions across the EU by 2030. From 2020 onwards, refrigerants with a GWP of over 2500 will be made illegal for any system, starting the next 10-year phase down of hydrofluorocarbon gases with the ultimate objective to cut the availability of HFCs by 79% between 2015 and 2030. R410a and R32: The difference is in the GWP There is a simple explanation to illustrate the huge potential to be gained from switching from R410a to R32. For sake of argument, we will say there is one million tonnes of refrigerant currently in the UK market inside hermetically sealed direct expansion units, as this allows us to see a direct comparison between R410A and R32. To keep the numbers simple to calculate, if we assume a leakage rate of 1% from these one million tonnes, this means that 10,000 tonnes of R410A is being released into the atmosphere. When the refrigerant is inside the sealed system, the global warming ‘potential’ is 2,088, but once it has been released this becomes the global Mitsubishi Electric’s M-Series with R32 The City Multi YNWwas the first VRF system to make use of R32