Hi Abayomi,
MATLAB and Simulink, along with Simscape Fluids, provide tools for modelling fluid systems, but accessing detailed thermophysical properties for specific refrigerants directly within these environments can be a bit more complex than for water/steam, which is often directly supported.
Using blocks present in the Simscape foundational library allows you to model systems involving refrigerants and have built in property tables for common refrigerants. Blocks like the ‘Two phase fluid properties (2P)’ block in Simscape can be configured for different refrigerants.
For non-native refrigerants, you can use external libraries like ‘coolprop’ which is an open source thermophysical properties library with a MATLAB wrapper which can be used.
Therefore, By creating custom data tables/block models using the ‘Two-Phase Fluid Properties (2P)‘ block, you can effectively incorporate refrigerant properties into your simulations. For more information on the same, you can refer to the following documentations:
- Refrigeration cycle in Simscape: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/46448-refrigeration-cycle-in-simscape
- Thermal liquid properties: https://www.mathworks.com/help/hydro/ref/thermalliquidpropertiestl.html
- Manually generate fluid property tables: https://www.mathworks.com/help/simscape/ug/manually-generate-fluid-property-tables.html
- Coolprop library: http://www.coolprop.org/index.html
- Two-Phase Fluid Properties (2P) block: https://www.mathworks.com/help/simscape/ref/twophasefluidproperties2p.html
- Create cryogenic liquid in simscape: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/719150-how-to-create-cryogenic-liquid-in-simscape
Hope this helps!
