Life cycle assessment of hypermarket refrigeration system: effects of location and choice of architecture.analyse de cyce de vie d'un systeme de refrigeration d'hypermarche : influence de la localisation et de l'architecture du systeme.

Summary Taking into consideration all the life cycle of a product is now an important step in the design of a product or a technology. Despite the improvement in refrigerant regulation, the environmental impacts of refrigeration systems remain important and need to be improved. In this paper, the environmental impacts of refrigeration systems in a typical hypermarket are compared using the LCA methodology under different conditions. The system is used to provide cold at two levels of temperature: medium and low temperature during a life period of 15 years. The most commonly used architectures of hypermarket cold production systems are investigated: centralized direct expansion systems and indirect systems using a secondary loop to transport the cold. The variation of power needed during seasonal changes and during the daily opening/closure periods of the hypermarket are considered. R134a as the primary refrigerant fluid and two types of secondary fluids are considered (liquid CO2 and ammonia). The composition of each system and the leakage rate of the refrigerant through its life cycle are taken from the literature and industrial data. Twelve scenarios are examined. They are based on the variation of three parameters, 1. location: France (Paris), Spain (Toledo) and Sweden (Stockholm), 2. different sources of electric consumption: photovoltaic panels and low voltage electric network and 3. architecture: direct and indirect refrigeration systems. SimaPro software was used to assess the environmental performances and different impact assessment methods were used. CML method is used to evaluate the midpoint environmental indicators and IMPACT 2002+ to assess endpoint indicators. This study highlights the most environmentally damaging parameter to be electric consumption compared to the impacts of refrigerant leakage supporting the conclusions of previous studies. The use of a secondary loop lowers the refrigerant amount in the primary loop and thus the climate change indicator is reduced. The cost estimation of CAPEX and OPEX shows that depending on the location the use of photovoltaic panels can be more expensive and does not bring any improvement in environmental impacts.