Performance of different throttle refrigeration cycles**This work is financially supported by the National Natural Sciences Foundation of China under the contract number of 50206024

Publisher Summary This chapter presents thermodynamic models to analyze the thermodynamic performances of those throttle refrigeration cycles, especially the recuperative mixed-refrigerant cycles for low temperature refrigeration applications. Numerous cycle configurations have been presented based on the Joule-Thomson effect of real gases for different refrigeration applications from cryogenic temperature to room temperature. Using throttle device to produce refrigeration is the general feature among those refrigeration cycles, such as the vapor-compression cycle, the cascade cycle, the single-stage recuperative cycle with mixed-refrigerants, and the dual mixed-refrigerant cascade recuperative cycle. The Carnot efficiency is used as a comparison criterion in the comparisons of all those throttle cycles at different refrigeration temperature ranges. The results show that with optimal mixture and cycle configuration, the low-temperature recuperative refrigeration cycle can achieve a high performance as good as the commercial vapor compression cycle. The optimized results at ideal compressing-process conditions show that all the throttle cycles can provide near equivalent values even providing refrigeration from cryogenic temperature to near room temperature ranges.