Coolprop vs. Refprop

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NH3 Eng

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Sep 12, 2018, 10:50:37 AM9/12/18
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Hey Guys!

I'm new here, but I had a question about when to use coolprop and when to use refprop. I recently had another engineer recommend that I request that my company purchase refprop. I work in industrial refrigeration, so most of my work deals with the refrigeration cycle using ammonia as a working fluid. I will probably want to work with some other refrigerants eventually as well as air and glycols. But back to my point, what are some things that it is wiser to just use refprop for rather than coolprop? I found the article below from last year 


It seems to indicate that there are some weaknesses in coolprop around mixtures and phase equilibrium. At this point, I am not extremely concerned about mixtures since these don't really come into my work very often (other than air, which coolprop seems to handle well). I'm not exactly sure what is meant by "phase equilibrium" in the post above. I do not typically need properties of mixtures of liquid and vapor, though we do calculate two phase pressure drop. However, at this point our two phase pressure drop calculations typically utilize the properties of pure liquid and pure vapor to determine the total pressure drop. I'm just trying to understand if refprop is really overkill for what I am trying to do. Maybe this isn't enough information, but any help would be greatly appreciated!
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