Development of a Refrigerant Recovery and Recycling Machine

Abstract

Indiscriminate discharge of refrigerants into the atmosphere during servicing or overhauling of refrigerating systems by Heating, Ventilation and Air-conditioning (HVAC) Practitioners is one of the major contributing factors to ozone depletion and climate change. The objectives of this study are to: design, fabricate and evaluate the performance of refrigerants recovery and recycling machine. The machine with 19.44 kg/hr rated capacity produced at cost of N106, 503.00 (about USD 500) with locally sourced materials comprises: compressor, drier, capillary tube, solenoid valves, two (2) pressure gauges and heat exchanger as functional parts. In order to evaluate the performance of  this machine, R-12 and R-22 refrigerants were considered for its analysis and results showed that for every 1 kg refrigerant recovered and recycled it has average recovery and recycling efficiencies of 88.5 % and 85.68 % whilst recycling used refrigerant to 99.9 % of its original purity.

Keywords: Refrigerants, Ozone Depletion, Global Warming, Recovery, Recycling, Performance evaluation