Contribution to the gas chromatographic analysis for both refrigerants composition and cell gas in insulating foams – Part I: Method

In this paper, an easy low cost chromatographic analysis for both refrigerants blend composition and cell gas in insulating foams is presented. This work firstly deals with the measurement protocols for these substances. The presented protocols are simple, likely to be used by non-specialists of chemical analysis (i.e. by refrigeration engineers). Among other methods, gas chromatography was used for separation and detection of halocarbons. For refrigerants extracted from refrigeration plants, the analysis requires a prior oil separation. As for insulating foams, analysis of cell gas composition is processed with the same protocol. Sampling remains of main importance; two possible sampling methods were validated and compared. Finally, the interest in the analysis method is illustrated with the example of a real application: study of the distillation phenomenon of a zeotropic refrigerant in an industrial refrigeration plant with flooded evaporators. The results are discussed for their consequences on the working performances of the refrigerating system. In part II, we propose original results obtained with that method to study the aging of insulating foams.