The most common types of refrigerants used in automobiles today usually include HCFCs and HFCs, which have the potential of ozone depletion or the greenhouse effect. Although environmentally friendly refrigerants are being developed, there is still a lack of safety and high-cost problems for new refrigerants. This study was conducted to determine the flow of refrigerants from automotive air conditioners and examine their potential problems and a proper management plan. The number of automobiles manufactured, the number of automobiles in use, and end-of-vehicle flow were examined through available statistics and reports. The material flow of refrigerants has been determined by the life cycle of automobiles and the unit requirements of the refrigerants used in automobiles. Based on the results, in 2014, there were approximately 1,017 tons of refrigerants introduced from the manufacturing stage of automobiles, and about 395 tons of refrigerants leaked from the use stage. After the use stage, only 13 tons of refrigerants were delivered to treatment facilities and 195 tons were emitted into the atmosphere during the dismantling process. As a result, in South Korea in 2014, a large amount of refrigerants (590 tons) was estimated to have been leaked into the atmosphere from automotive air conditioners during the use and dismantlement stage. Several preventive measures for refrigerants should be properly enforced by introducing economic incentives as well as a monitoring system with strengthened laws and policies.

Considering the high potential of the widely-used halogenated hydrocarbons on the global warming and ozone depletion, the development of effective thermal destruction methods of these compounds are quite urgent and indispensible. As part of the research efforts of this area, the destruction of CCl4 and flame characteristics have been investigated numerically by the co-firing CCl4 with CH4 in an industrial LNG-fired combustor as a function of molar ratio of the CCl4 to CH4 using a commercial code of STAR-CCM+. Considering a broad range of Damkohler number associated with the process of intensive CHCs (Chlorinated hydrocarbons) combustion with auxiliary fuel together with the inhibition reaction especially near flammability limits, a proper combustion modeling of CCl4 thermal destruction is quite desirable. In this study, however, after careful review of the literature about the flame characteristics of halogenated hydrocarbon together with the previous study about the modeling of the CCl4 flame based on the data of burning velocity, the eddy breakup turbulent combustion model was employed since it is quite reasonably assumed that chain branching reaction looks dominant in most flame region over the halogenated inhibition effect in strong turbulent reacting flows. One of the most useful results based on this study is that; without any incorporation of flame inhibition effect, the length of co-fired flame increases steadily as the ratio of CCl4 to CH4 (R) increases from 0.0, 0.1, 0.2 to 0.5, and 1.0 together with the increase of the maximum flame and exit gas temperature. The reason of the increase of the flame length with the increase of flame temperature can be explained by the presence of the additional CCl4 fuel with low heating value. Further a detailed discussion has been made on the thermal destruction of CCl4 together with the Cl2 concentration by Deacon reaction.