AIR CONDITIONING The spirit of F-Gas
Air conditioning has become an essential part of today’s commercial life and it is now taken for granted that a modern office block or commercial property will have some form of air conditioning in place. Phil Ord, head of marketing and sales strategy at Mitsubishi Electric UK looks at how R32 fits into the picture.
T
oday’s systems offer a highly effective way of delivering energy efficient cooling and heating. These intelligent and automated units can cool down our buildings to counter the excess heat produced by IT equipment, while also making sure the office offers comfort levels that enable employees to work at their highest function.
As a manufacturer, we continue to refine our systems helping them become more energy efficient, more powerful and more controllable and at the heart of the current debate within the industry is the choice of refrigerant used within the systems. By now, we all know the reasons behind the move from R410a refrigerant to R32, not least of which is the significant drop in global warming potential (GWP) from one to the other.
This is because, despite the best efforts of everyone involved, there remains a potential for refrigerant leakage and emissions can occur during installation, commissioning and ongoing maintenance of equipment.
This is a major part of the reason that the EU introduced the original F-Gas Regulation in 2006 which focused on controlling emissions through improved quality of installations, refrigerant recovery and training.
A Direct Comparison
For anyone who has still to grasp the huge potential to be gained from switching from R410a to R32, there is a simple explanation which illustrates what the ‘spirit of the F-Gas Regulations’.
For the sake of argument, let’s take an assumed figure of one million tonnes of refrigerant currently in the UK market inside hermetically sealed direct expansion units. This allows us to see a direct comparison between R410A and R32 and demonstrate the importance of this transition to the industry.
26 February 2020
To keep the numbers simple to calculate, if we assume a leakage rate of 1% from these one million tonnes, this would mean 10,000 tonnes of R410A 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 warming ‘impact’ and in the case of R410A, the impact would be 20.8 million tonnes of CO2
equivalent (10,000 tonnes x 2,088 GWP).
With R32, the 1% leakage rate from one million tonnes still results in 10,000 tonnes being released into the atmosphere. However, now the GWP has been significantly lowered from 2,088 to 675. This means that the global warming ‘impact’ of R32 would be 6.75 million tonnes compared to 20.8 million tonnes with R410A.
That is a reduction of over 300% regardless of the figures used in the calculation. The tonnes may change, but the GWP figures for both refrigerants are constant and the percentage improvement from the use of R32 is also constant.
For me, that is why the transition to R32 is so timely and is another step on the road to even lower GWP, especially when less refrigerant is needed within each comparable system.
It all starts with training
One of the most important areas to help the industry reduce any potential for leakage has to be training and it is now mandatory for anyone working with refrigerants to get F-Gas certification from Refcom – an industry leading provider of F-Gas certification training.
This verifies that someone is competent to install, commission, decommission or maintain a system containing refrigerant and that they are qualified in the safe handling of refrigerants and environmentally aware of the proper, auditable procedures.
www.acr-news.com
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