when the refrigerant passes through the metering device, some of it starts to flash from a liquid to a gas because

Most Nikon lens will work in complete manual mode, but to get the most from the lens (auto-focus, metering) stick to Nikkor lenses with AF or G in the title.

Full comparability chart in the related links below.

when the refrigerant passes through the metering device, some of it starts to flash from a liquid to a gas because

It would depend on the type of lens mount. Generally speaking, it would probably not work too well. The AE uses full-aperture TTL metering, and its mechanism for manipulating the diaphragm of the lens is not likely to work with the "digital" lens, although that is not a sure thing. Try to gently mate the lens and body. If the lens will mount, shoot a roll of film and see how it goes.

TTL stands for Through The Lens metering. This is system where the camera measures the light on a scene based only on the light coming through the lens. Prior to TTL, there would be a light sensor on the top of the body (or a hand held unit) which measured the light coming from a fixed angle of view. The problem with this method is that it didn't take into account the angle of view of the lens in use. If a wide-angle lens was mounted, only the center of the viewed area would be used in exposure calculations, ignoring areas at the edges which could be brighter or dimmer than the center. When a telephoto (or long focus) lens was mounted, areas around the actually image would be included in the exposure calculation even though they are not included in the eventual image. TTL metering accounts for these differences by measuring light at the film plane. In more modern usage TTL is often used to refer to the flash metering system used by a camera. All of the same information applies. Nikon TTL is the Nikon camera company's version of the processing. The latest Nikon flash system is actually known as iTTL.